Words is getting around.
PolicyMic
Inside Modern Money Theory: Our Route to Full Employment and No Debt
Rollo Martins | Longtime Republican, now thoroughly disgusted with the party; consider myself an Independent. Both parties need to make atonement. I've been a pharmacist since 1982 and am an advocate for single-payer healthcare for financial & Christian reasons.
(h/t Charles Haydn on FB)
3 comments:
I saw this. Funny. I was a longtime frustrated Republican, too.
This sort of thing is good - the more publicity MMT gets the better.
However, unless you can win the argument with other economists then you will lose overall.
MMT seems to get quite a lot of public attention because it has a simple message. However the underlying argument is actually quite complex. This combination is problematic: a lot of people see the simple message and immediately reject it, because they have no understanding of the more complex argument which underpins it. This reaction is shared by both lay people, such as some of those commenting on the article above, and academics.
The problem is that a lot of people never get past the simple message to the more complex argument, and so simply keep a bad impression of what they think MMT is. This can actually be exacerbated when amateur MMT enthusiasts make inept or confused attempts to explain the theory, either to other amateurs or to economists via blogs.
Whilst it is useful to have this sort of popular publicity for MMT, and popular debate, it would be far more useful and effective if there was a proper in-depth academic argument going on at the same time between the MMT economists and other economists. Until this happens, and until MMT and other post-Keynesians really start winning those arguments, then change will be very, very slow.
I agree with Y: MMT is superficially simple, but the arguments behind it are complex. But same goes for the arguments for / against regulating economies by other means, e.g. traditional monetary or fiscal policy. Same goes for that little formula E=MC2. So MMT is not at a disadvantage there.
Re Rollo Martins’s (and MMTers’) claim that tax gives money it’s value, I think that’s a minor point. It should be left out of literature that introduces MMT. For those studying the history of money it’s an important point. Where the state’s money competes with other types of money, a law that forces people to pay taxes in the state’s money certainly gives the state’s money a lot of clout.
But once a type of money is dominant, it takes a lot to get people to abandon it. I.e. even if tax as a proportion of GDP were reduced to 5% or so, that wouldn’t threaten the dominance of the US dollar in the US, for example.
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