Category: Uncategorized

Everything in it’s place. For now.

This site concentrates on the contributions of the current principal architects of Modern Monetary Theory: the economists and academics who have done and continue to do the heavy lifting. When Dave and I launched the site shortly after I returned from the first international MMT conference last year, we set up some basic categories for the  purposes of sorting material into  categories that we expected would be intuitively sensible to journalists and commentators (like him) who would be interested in becoming MMT literate and then widening that circle of literacy; and to ordinary people (like me) who, drawn in by curiosity or chance, determined to learn more.  

These folks, mainly the academic teachers of macroeconomics, are nothing if not prolific.

After returning home from the second international conference, having fallen even further behind in adding content, it seemed necessary to further refine our organization. The earlier set of categories were beginning to resemble overfull closets. Time for additional closets. Accordingly, in the past few months, we’ve:

  • Moved “Primary Sources” up from the Resources drop-down menu to the top level of the menu and later created a “Teachers Teach” page for each of experts, our primary sources. Entries in “Teachers Teach” consist primarily of videos but also link to websites where they contribute their less formal thinking, and the occasional Twitter thread.
  • Under Resources,  podcasts are now separate from videos. 
  • Also under Resources, we have Nice Things We Can Have or Applied MMT. Under it, we’ve created separate pages for content related to the federal Job Guarantee, Student Loan cancellation, Medicare for All, Social Security, and Green New Deal.

This is the very definition of work in progress. Nothing is finished. I encourage our dozen readers to browse around. Suggestions are welcome.

MMT is Both Descriptive and Prescriptive

Harvested from Twitter. Because I needed it spelled out.

“It’s weird how people sometimes talk about MMT’s prescriptive side as if it’s not customary for a macro framework to have both descriptive and prescriptive elements. 1/x

Milton Friedman gave us the expectations-augmented Phillips Curve (descriptive, in his mind) as well as a (prescriptive policy) monetary growth rule. 2/x

New Classical economists gave us models rooted in rational expectations and then insisted on the importance of announced (vs. unannounced) changed in the money supply. 3/x

Real Business Cycle models emphasize technological shocks as drivers of macro fluctuations but advocate laissez faire, which *is itself a policy prescription*! 4/x

The point is, one’s understanding of the behavior of the macro system naturally invites a policy stance to complement the analysis and optimize performance. 5/5”

Gleaned from Twitter and Facebook

“The core MMT (Modern Monetary Theory – ed) academics have all been tenured (many of us more than once) based on strength of peer-reviewed publications, including heavy empirical/theoretical work. Please rise above this dismissive rhetoric.”
— Stephanie Kelton

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”
— unknown, though often attributed to Ghandi

“The US government doesn’t use income. It generates government “money” when it spends, which becomes income for the private sector.

The federal budget goes through a lengthy process: In general, the President submits a budget to Congress which goes to the budget committees of the House and Senate, then on to budget resolutions. Congress can propose its own budget prior to the President’s. Whether or not spending must be constructed as a bill (legislation) depends on if spending is discretionary, or mandatory.

If spending is discretionary, this requires annual legislation passed by Congress and submitted to the President for signature or veto. If mandatory, spending simply occurs.”
— Ellis Winningham