Critique: The Case Against Money

Source: jacobin
Authors: ByMona Ali
URL: https://jacobin.com/2026/05/against-money-economics-book-review

What the article reports

Mona Ali, an economist, reviews Against Money by J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev, summarising the book's critique of mainstream macroeconomic concepts (GDP, aggregate production functions, the natural interest rate). She uses the review as a vehicle for broader arguments about heterodox monetary theory, China's trade surplus, UK fiscal policy, and the limits of orthodox economics. The piece closes with a recommendation that the book will appeal to a wide, non-specialist audience.

Factual accuracy — Mixed

Several attributions check out: Keynes's "liquidity preference" framing is standard, the Federal Open Market Committee sets the US benchmark rate, and Paul Volcker's early-1980s tightening is historical record. The description of nominal vs. real GDP is accurate.

However, a number of specific claims are either unverifiable as written or introduced without evidence:

• "the current crisis that centers on the blockaded Strait of Hormuz" — no date, no source, and no corroborating detail. As of the article's May 2026 dateline this is a significant real-world claim inserted without attribution; a reader cannot confirm it.
• "hedge funds and other holders of government debt are driving up the cost of gilts — UK government bonds — by selling them" — presented as current fact with no source or date anchor, and the causal mechanism (hedge funds specifically) is contested in financial economics.
• The claim that Paul Krugman "has just pointed out" European productivity rests on faulty premises is vague — no link, no piece title, no date — making it unverifiable and time-sensitive.
• The article attributes a quote ("extremely unlikely to exist at the sectoral level, let alone for the economy as a whole") to Jeremy Rudd's A Practical Guide to Macroeconomics — this is a specific citation that readers cannot easily check, but it is at least attributed.

Overal the piece handles historical economic claims carefully but introduces live geopolitical and financial claims without sourcing.

Framing — Tendentious

1. "a brilliant analysis and critique" — The reviewer calls the book "brilliant" in the third paragraph and again later ("brilliantly call 'anti-knowledge'"). Unattributed evaluative adjectives in a review are the author's own voice, not attributed to any critic or counter-reader; they signal advocacy rather than assessment.

2. "purely ideological" — The claim that "the natural interest rate as well as the natural rate of unemployment … are purely ideological" is stated as authorial conclusion, not as a contested position. The word "purely" forecloses debate without engaging any mainstream defense of these concepts.

3. "(read: Department of Government Efficiency cuts)" — The parenthetical gloss on "fiscal consolidation" inserts a politically loaded equivalence without argument, steering the reader's interpretation of a technical term.

4. "risks inciting both great powers to war" — The escalatory framing of the US-China trade debate is asserted without evidence or qualification, doing emotional work the article does not support analytically.

5. "takes courage and skill" — The closing encomium ("It takes courage and skill to write about money in accessible and nontechnical prose") is unattributed praise in the author's own voice, appropriate for an op-ed but undisclosed as such.

Source balance

Ratio — supportive : critical : neutral ≈ 7 : 0 : 1. No mainstream macroeconomist is given space to defend GDP accounting, aggregate production functions, or the natural-rate framework. Lighthizer and Powell are named only to be rebutted; neither is quoted directly.

Omissions

1. No mainstream defense of critiqued concepts. The article argues that real GDP, aggregate production functions, and the natural interest rate are fundamentally flawed. A reader would want to know whether any mainstream economists find these critiques unpersuasive and why — that debate exists and is material.

2. No disclosure of the reviewer's stake. Ali writes "I mention this example because…" and "economists (like myself)" — she is an economist with apparent heterodox sympathies reviewing a book by fellow heterodox economists. No institutional affiliation is given in the piece (see Transparency).

3. Strait of Hormuz claim. The assertion of a "blockaded Strait of Hormuz" driving a commodity crisis is introduced and dropped in two sentences, with no date, context, or sourcing. It is doing significant argumentative work (linking theory to current crisis) but receives no elaboration.

4. MMT vs. Mason/Jayadev distinction. The article gestures at a difference between Modern Monetary Theory and the book's position ("For Mason and Jayadev, real resources aren't the fundamental constraints … the capacity to make (monetary) promises is") but does not explain the distinction clearly enough for a general reader to follow.

5. Prior heterodox critiques. The piece mentions the "Cambridge controversies" in one sentence but does not explain why Mason and Jayadev's intervention is meaningfully new — a reader would want that comparison developed.

What it does well

• The piece is accessible and well-paced for specialist material; the distinction between nominal and real GDP is explained cleanly: "nominal GDP counts the total value of all goods and services in an economy using current market prices, while real GDP holds prices at an arbitrary base year."
• The Seton anecdote ("Seton's father handed him a bill for the total cost of raising him") is an effective humanising opener that grounds abstract monetary theory in lived experience.
• The Piketty comparison in the closing paragraph — "Unlike Piketty, who seeks to understand 'the deep structures of capital and inequality' by imputing wealth estimates across centuries (with questionable assumptions)" — is a rare moment of qualified, comparative critical judgment rather than pure boosterism.
• The explanation of the opportunity cost of liquidity ("The opportunity costs of holding cash are the forgone interest payments that could be earned if the cash was in a bank account") is pedagogically clear.

Rating

Overall: 5/10 — An engaged, knowledgeable review that reads more as advocacy than critical assessment, with significant source imbalance and several unattributed interpretive leaps.