Speaker

George Selgin

George Selgin

American monetary economist; Senior Fellow and Director Emeritus of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute, and Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Georgia.

Selgin trained at NYU under a PhD in economics (after an undergraduate degree in economics and zoology from Drew University) and built his career on a single, sustained question: how much of the state’s role in money is actually necessary? His first book, The Theory of Free Banking (1988), argued that competing private banks issuing their own currency could produce a stable monetary system even without a gold standard, provided the monetary base itself were managed by a fixed, credible rule. He has spent the decades since applying that free-market, rules-based lens to monetary history and policy — from the note-issuing ‘free banking’ era of eighteenth-century Scotland (Good Money, 2008) to the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath (Floored!, 2018) and the case for a gently falling price level in a growing economy (Less Than Zero, 2018). His most recent book, False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933–1947, reassesses what the New Deal actually did — and did not do — to end the Great Depression.

Selgin describes himself as libertarian specifically on monetary questions rather than across economic policy generally — he arrived at that position by asking whether money needed as much state involvement as is usually assumed, and concluding it did not, without extending the same scepticism reflexively to every other policy area.

Core positions

  • Free banking without a gold standard. Selgin’s foundational argument: private, competing banks issuing currency can be stable without gold backing, so long as the monetary base is managed by a fixed rule rather than discretionary central-bank judgement. He regards a full return to the gold standard as now impossible — a government that has broken a gold-convertibility promise once cannot credibly recommit not to break it again.
  • NGDP targeting over discretionary monetary policy. His preferred reform is a rules-based ‘night watchman Fed’ — even, in the limit, a computer — targeting stable growth in nominal GDP, rather than a committee exercising discretion meeting to meeting. He has long argued central bank independence, however imperfect in practice, is worth defending precisely because so little of it remains.
  • Regime uncertainty as an economic mechanism, not just a slogan. Selgin treats policy unpredictability — as distinct from an anticipated bad policy, however severe — as a specific, measurable drag on investment: businesses cannot price risk they cannot even define the rules for. See Regime Uncertainty.
  • Revisionist on the New Deal’s mechanism of recovery. He credits the 1933–34 dollar devaluation and gold inflows, not fiscal or monetary stimulus, with the New Deal era’s genuine recovery gains, and blames price-fixing schemes (the NRA) and regime uncertainty for stalling them.

In the wiki