Many moons ago I did a post about the soft bits of MMT - those where it wasn't 100% clear precisely what happens. I've had a few people mention these points recently and this post brings my thoughts up to date.3spoken
It's important to realise that you can never understand the current system completely, and you certainly can't be 100% sure what will happen when you change it. It's always a balance of probabilities game.
In systems design this leads to the classic barrier to change - knowns as 'analysis paralysis'.
You spend ever increasing amounts of time studying the current way of doing things because fundamentally you're frightened of proposing a change and getting it wrong. So nothing ever happens, or things change underneath you rendering your studies obsolete.
So you can only ever get to a point where you know enough so that you can manage the risks. Then you've got to try something and see if it works - backing out if it doesn't. Otherwise nothing every changes.
I think we're at that point now where we know enough about the current model that we can get on and build solid proposals for a brave new world.
We're ready to try something.
So let's see where the state of the art suggests we are at the moment.
Musings on MMT - Firming Up The Soft Bits
Neil Wilson
Finally, someone who seems to understand my views.
ReplyDeleteHowever, Neil, all the things you mention cannot really be asked of economists & currency ops people. In the USA we have "NAIS" codes describing every branch of education or training individuals can become isolated & lost in. The list was over 2000 several years back, and has recently been further fragmented into 10's of thousands of subcategories.
Not sure what you use in the UK. The point is that to continuously tune a dynamice economy, you'll eventually have to recruit people from all those industry sectors to demand full-system tuning, not just financial tuning.