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Larry Moss is certainly correct that monetarism has both a limited meaning 
as some form of the quantity theory as well as a broader meaning as a whole 
constellation of pro-market, limited government ideas that "center on" the  
quantity theory. I believe that Thomas Mayer's _Structure of Monetarism_ 
(1979) (in its first 2 chapters) has the best treatment of the 
constellation of ideas that economists have pulled into the orbit of the 
term "monetarism". 
 
But I'm afraid it isn't quite as easy to pull these two definitions apart 
as Larry Moss suggests. The two countries that come to mind first for 
having tried monetarism (defined narrowly as monetary aggregate targeting 
to achieve a stable price level) and then having had to abandon it are the 
U.S. and the U.K. But in both cases, the implementation of monetary 
aggregate targeting was accompanied by financial market deregulation that 
would by any definition be a part of the broader definition of monetarism 
(pro-market, laissez faire). But what made it impossible to stick with the 
monetary aggregate targeting? One element of the problem was undoubtedly 
the very deregulation(s) that the adherents of monetarism had instituted as 
a part of their program(s). Thus, I don't believe that it is so easy to 
extract one definition of the term monetarism from the failure of another 
form of the idea that you want to privilege. What happened to "monetarism" 
in the public arena embodied both the definitions that Larry Moss suggests 
we consider. 
 
Now, as I pointed out in an earlier post, Brad DeLong has argued that 
monetarism's influence has been deep and pervasive despite the failure of 
monetary aggregate targeting. One can point, for instance, to the continued 
focus on inflation by central banks in the industrialized world, as well as 
the continued focus on lags in the effect of policy. But if there are parts 
of the original program of monetarism that still have purchase in the 
policy arena, this is not because some simple (or complex) form of 
monetarism still reigns. Ideas have continued to change and we now have the 
kind of arguments for "disciplined discretion" that one finds in the 
literature on inflation targeting. But inflation targeting is not 
monetarism. 
 
Something has happened to the ideas that economists use and that is what I 
propose we study. In particular, I propose that we examine the whole 
history of how and why monetarism rose to prominence, and why it fell. 
Whether we like it or not, that study involves both of the senses of 
monetarism that Larry Moss offers us. I think that the question of what 
remains of monetarism (e.g., concern with inflation, acknowledgement of the 
importance of time lags in the effect of policy) is a seperate question, 
but one that we won't be able to examine until we have better history of 
what happened to monetarism in the first place. 
 
One step at a time! 
 
Brad Bateman 
Grinnell College 
 
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