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Robert, 
 
Thanks for your support for the idea of an international study group on 
monetarism! Your 4 point schemata is very good, I think. 
 
I admit that my own idea had been more limited, focusing more on your point 
number 4: " an investigation of the process by which monetarist ideas 
permeated the policy marketplace (in The Rise and Fall of Monetarism, David 
Smith made a start with respect to Britain)." I have felt for many years 
that we need a version of Peter Hall's (edited) collection, _The Political 
Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations_, which is (for the 
most part) a set of country case studies of how demand management was (was 
not) adopted in several industrialized nations. This is why I had suggested 
an "international" group; I was thinking of a study of when and why 
monetarism had been adopted in different countries and when why it was 
abandoned in its formulation as a theory of macro-policy by monetary 
aggregate targeting. 
 
But I agree that your other points need more attention and that these are 
all aspects of one large story. I'm not sure that all four of these points 
could be addressed in a single volume. But perhaps it is only the limits of 
my original vision that would require the project to be a single volume? 
Although I do think that it might be easier to get funding for a study 
group focused on your number four. And the high quality of the Hall volume 
is due, in part, to the fact that they had the funding to bring all the  
contributors together more than once to refine and focus the papers (and to 
invite additional contributions as their value became more clear, if I 
remember correctly). 
 
Brad Bateman 
Grinnell College 
 
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