OK for the next few weeks we are going to play a game called Bop a Mole.
Here’s the deal. For more than two decades a small group of scholars hashed out what became Modern Money Theory. We’ve written many books, a hundred chapters for edited volumes, hundreds of published articles, and thousands of blogs presenting the theory and defending it against critics.
Yet practically every day a Mole pops up to ask: “Why doesn’t MMT ever talk about XXX?” You’ve seen the claims:
Mole 1: MMT never deals with inflation.
Mole 2: MMT never talks about exchange rate effects.
Mole 3: MMT cannot relax the consolidation assumption.
Mole 4: MMT ignores the private banks.
Mole 5: MMT is just like slavery; it forces people to work for welfare.
Mole 6: MMT promotes unbridled growth, ignoring environmental sustainability.
We Bop one Mole and another jumps up. In fact, every possible critique of MMT has been addressed in at least a dozen different academic papers and probably a hundred blogs.
The problem is that the Mole Bopping is sometimes buried deep in the paper, perhaps in an argument that is too academic. Or it is too hard to find the exact blogs where we’ve dealt with the issue. Heck, I cannot remember 95% of the stuff I’ve written, much less find it.
So I thought we’d play a game, Bopping Moles, and try to keep these Mole Boppings organized for future reference. When Mole 1 Pops up again, we can just pull out Mole Bopping #1. No reason to re-Bop if you’ve Bopped ‘em once.
We’ll Bop a Mole today. I’ll open up the comments section to your suggestions for the next Mole Bopping.
Economonitor — Great Leap Forward
L. Randall Wray | Professor of Economics, University of Missouri at Kansas City
