Monday, January 30, 2023

How They Paid for the War — Sam Levy

I am certainly not the first person to point to wartime mobilization as a model for our response to climate change. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made headlines3 for it within politics, but academics such as JW Mason, Andrew Bossie, and Isabella Weber have also worked to extract lessons from World War II for today.4 In my research I zero in on the Treasury, a key nexus of macroeconomic policymaking, and compare and contrast their view specifically with that of MMT.

The method is historical: I dug through various sources, primary and secondary, to piece together the worldview held by Treasury officials. The result is a surprisingly long list of direct quotations that you could easily mistake for having come from an MMT economist.…
Of course, the MMT economists noticed this too.

Good article based on MMT principles but which is framed to appeal to the progressives looking at a Green New Deal rather than as a tract promoting MMT.

Strange Matters
How They Paid for the War
Sam Levy, doctoral candidate in Economics at the University of Missouri - Kansas City with a co-discipline in Public Administration, and a research fellow with the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. His work looks at how Modern Monetary Theory can be extended and modeled, and how the economics of wartime mobilization can inform rapid decarbonization.

4 comments:

hoonose said...

A very interesting book if you have not read:

https://www.amazon.com/Keep-All-Thoughtful-Men-Economists/dp/1591144914?tag=nakorn-20

Matt Franko said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Peter Pan said...

The use of ration coupons during the world war period would be unthinkable in the USA today.

Adam Eran said...

The government managed 50% of the economy in WWII. The Green New Deal would only take 5% (says Randall Wray).