The idea — known as helicopter drops — has a long history in economics. Lonergan notes that John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman both endorsed versions of it, but it's most closely associated with former Fed chair Ben Bernanke, who first raised the proposal in the context of Japan's economic malaise in 1999 and repeated it in 2002 as a Fed board member. And the logic behind it is fairly easy even for laymen to understand.

We often talk about what the Fed does to spur the economy as "printing money," but we rarely spell out exactly what that entails. Usually, it means buying up bonds with money the Fed invents on the spot. That increases the money supply, lowers interest rates, and stimulates borrowing, thus improving the economy. Usually, the amounts involved are very small, and used by the Fed to keep interest rates at a certain target. But since the recession, the amounts involved have grown enormously, a policy known as quantitative easing (QE). The Fed has, through three rounds of QE, bought trillions of dollars worth of bonds from financial institutions.

The hope is that will lower interest rates in the long run still further, and shore up confidence in financial markets that the Fed isn't going to let the economy fall into recession again. But Blyth and Lonergan argue the pathways by which QE can be effective are too circuitous. "Low interest rates are simply not stimulating spending, which is what the central bank is trying to achieve," Lonergan says. "Our view is that it'd be much simpler to transfer cash directly. It's simple, it can be quite immediate, and virtually all economists would agree that it would have a material impact on spending."

Blyth and Lonergan would take the money being used to buy bonds and use it instead to finance checks sent to every household. They'd either make grants of identical size to everybody, or, preferably, larger ones for people in the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution. "Targeting those who earn the least would have two primary benefits," they write. "For one thing, lower-income households are more prone to consume, so they would provide a greater boost to spending. For another, the policy would offset rising income inequality." The plan, they argue, would require much less money than quantitative easing does to be effective: "Print Less but Transfer More," as their Foreign Affairs headline has it.

Cash transfers are usually thought of as fiscal policy, since they're usually implemented as part of the general taxing and spending process that parliaments and other legislatures engage in. Blyth and Lonergan would grant some of that spending power to central banks. This idea has been around for a while, in various forms. Princeton economist Alan Blinder proposed establishing a value-added tax (VAT) and having a Fed-like board set its rate as a way of taking fiscal policy away from Congress and giving it to experts.

Blyth and Lonergan's version of the idea has a few benefits. For one thing, combining spending with money printing is likely more effective than doing just one or the other. But most crucially, central banks can act faster than legislatures. The sluggish pace of the legislative process means action on fiscal policy is often delayed. Blyth and Lonergan's proposal fixes that. "The great strength of monetary policy compared to fiscal policy is that it can be done very very quickly," Lonergan says. "All that's required is a conference call."

It's undemocratic, they concede — but then again, so's the current system. "We live in this bizarre world already where central banks are tasked with everything," Blyth says. "We can philosophically bemoan this fact, and I do bemoan it, or we can accept it and say, if you really want these guys to be the last economic institution standing, give them the tools they need."

Lonergan adds that in an important way, giving people cash rather than spending on bonds is more democratic. Whereas today, European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi is "trying to force businesses and households to borrow and force savers to take on risks they don't want to take," under the helicopter drop proposal "spending decisions [would be] decentralized to households."

Perhaps the most persuasive argument against Blyth and Lonergan is that the Fed doesn't actually need new tools. Economist Scott Sumner has argued that the Fed could have completely prevented the Great Recession by using its normal powers to implement nominal GDP targeting, a proposal in which the Fed attempts to keep the non-inflation-adjusted size of the economy growing at a steady rate by inflating when growth is slow and reducing inflation when it's fast.

Michigan economist Miles Kimball has argued that the Fed could use electronic money to set negative interest rates, enabling it to use the same tools it uses in normal times in cases where interest rates are close to zero. Johns Hopkins' Laurence Ball has called for raising the inflation target from 2 percent to 4 percent, to make it less likely that we'll hit a nominal interest rate of zero. The Peterson Institute's Joe Gagnon has arguedthat the Fed should just buy even more bonds, that there's "no reason to think that there’s any limit to the effectiveness of quantitative easing … They've just been too timid."

So why not adopt one of those plans? For one thing, Blyth and Lonergan express skepticism that Fed communications can do much of anything to improve the economy, something that Sumner and Ball's proposals in particular rely upon. "A lot of the alternative proposals seem to say that the central bank can just wave a magic wand and hit a higher level of inflation," Lonergan says. "If the central banks have a lot of other tools, I'd quite like to know what they are." There's also the appeal of their plan's distributional impact, as it would help lower-income households more in percentage terms even if all households got an identical transfer. By contrast, there's no reason to think traditional monetary policy would have a large or predictable effect on inequality at all.

In any case, they argue the plan's very simplicity is a major virtue compared to more complicated idea like the ones above. "All of these are complicated devices to increase spending. If you want to increase spending, just do it in the simplest way," Lonergan says. "It's almost as if the opposition to helicopter drops lies in its simplicity. There's an intellectual vested interest opposed to the idea, because if it's shown to work, people will rightfully say, what on earth have you been doing?"

Another counterargument is that helicopters amount to a government giveaway, or that it's unfair for the central bank to give people money they haven't earned. "Capitalism embodies an ethic that you must earn your crust, and if you create an economy whereby the crust is there without being earned, it's deeply disturbing on some political, ideological, and moral level," Blyth notes. But Lonergan notes that in a way, helicopter drops are more fair than conventional monetary policy, which necessarily tilts the balance between savers and borrowers. "We're not discriminating, or if we are, it's toward people with lower incomes," he says. "But we're not saying people who've borrowed money deserve something for nothing and people saving money should be arbitrarily penalized."

Intrigued? Be sure to check out the full transcript of my, Lonergan, and Blyth's conversation by toggling here. Be sure to also check out Reihan Salam's discussion of the idea at National Review. While Blyth and Lonergan are both lefties by orientation, the idea isn't inherently left-wing or right-wing, and the ideological diversity of its supporters is one of its most intriguing aspects.