Macro N Cheese

What a pleasure hearing Phil Armstrong tell us how MMT makes him feel supremely confident. He’s not afraid of going toe-to-toe with “experts” despite their credentials, because he has the right model. He has MMT.Phil was teaching high school economics in Iowa before going back to the UK to get his Masters and, much later, his PhD. An interest in post-Keynesianism eventually led him to Mosler and the world of MMT. He has recently published his first book, Can Heterodox Economics Make a Difference? Conversations with Key Thinkers. He tells Steve that when he started working on the interviews, in 2018, most of the mainstream hadn't heard of MMT. By 2020, when it was published, the profile of MMT had increased. Now everyone knows of it.The episode revisits the many criticisms of MMT – we've heard them all – and demolishes them. As for Weimar, Germany:“If you think about it, plausibly, if you imagine intelligent German bankers in the Weimar Republic -- and these are bankers, they don't like inflation. You tell me a banker who likes inflation. Never met one. So the idea that they came in one day into the Reichsbank when Havenstein gets the other guys, the chairman says, ‘Right, lads, crank up the presses. I just fancy causing a bit of hyperinflation.’ The idea is ludicrous.”Phil talks about the failings of mainstream economics. After the 2008 financial crisis, with all its models having failed, one might ask why those models are still around. Phil has some ideas about that. Mainstream economics consists of mathematical modeling which has almost no relevance in the real world. Phil compares it to being an expert on the unicorn. You understand its biology. “When its horns are the wrong color, you know what to do; when its hooves hurt, you know what to do. Fantastic. The only problem is the unicorn doesn't exist.”He and Steve talk about theory - The T in MMT (which is the subject of our very first episode). They talk about the traps built into neoliberalism, and philosophy. Phil calls himself a realist social ontologist, or a critical realist. If you want to know what that means, listen to the episode!From Phil Armstrong’s bio at Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies (GIMMS)As an Association for Heterodox Economics (AHE) member, Phil is a strong advocate of the need for pluralism in economics. He has spent the last 38 years teaching – in the main economics and business and lately, engineering. Phil is Post-Keynesian and a strong advocate of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and believes MMT provides both powerful insights into the way the economy works and how progressive economic policy can be put into practice.@PhilArmstrong58 on Twitter

It's hard to imagine ever having been unaware of the concept of bullshit jobs, but David Graeber made it official and helped us understand their role in our economy. Bullshit jobs are not necessarily shit jobs, nor are they low wage jobs, or dirty jobs. Bullshit jobs are those that are meaningless. The person doing the bullshit job doesn’t believe the work actually needs to get done.This week’s guest, Erik Dean, has studied the nature of modern jobs within money manager capitalism. He points out that bullshit jobs aren’t just a product of neoliberalism:“Speculative business and these labor hierarchies of the people with secure jobs versus the precariat … those things have been around. and it's not even necessarily part of capitalism. This is one reason it's good to read Thorstein Veblen, because in an anthropological sense, he takes it back to prior to capitalism. It's not like we didn't have hierarchies before capitalism. It's not like we didn't have power and it's not like we didn't have bullshit jobs. What the hell is a court jester? It's a bullshit job to entertain the king or whatever.”Dean talks with Steve about financialized capitalism – money market capitalism – and his disagreements with many on its basic characteristics. Just as bullshit jobs existed prior to our contemporary world, so did some of its other qualities, including its speculative nature and “short termism.”It was once thought that technology would relieve us of onerous jobs, allowing a shorter, lighter workweek, exchanging bullshit jobs for socially useful work. Steve confesses skepticism about the possibility of such a revolution. Dean responds:“If we were capable individually and collectively to reimagine what work is, what your time is best spent doing, and to break free of that encroaching neoliberal finance capitalist ideology that is, again, just gradually soaking into how we think about everything. To some extent, that is a revolution. If you can change the way you think and break free of the wider education of this neoliberalist ideology, that itself is a revolution.”**Don’t forget to check out the transcript for this and every episode of Macro N Cheese as well as the Extras page with additional resources. Find them at realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/Erik Dean is an Instructor of Economics at Portland Community College and researcher at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. His core expertise is in heterodox production theory, institutionalist methodology, and pedagogy in economics. His recent research covers a range of topics, including the nature of the modern occupational structure and the place of the corporation in money manager capitalism and the ramifications thereof.

Here’s an episode for those Marxists curious about MMT and MMTers curious about Marxism. Steve’s guest is comfortable identifying as both. Tony, better known as 1Dime on social media, believes MMT is not a threat to Marxism because it’s like comparing apples to oranges. They are designed to explain two different things. “Modern Monetary Theory is about understanding monetary operations in a fiat currency world – how things are financed. It's a narrow theory.”He’s careful about labeling himself, but in the marketplace of ideas, Tony says:“I find myself leaning the closest to Marxism in terms of its method because it sees things through the lens of class struggle and puts forth a first and foremost materialist view of history. I think that's very important because typically a lot of people will look at history as an evolution of ideas and will look at the individual as isolated from society. Marxism looks at things as an interconnected reality filled with contradictions.“The ontology of Marxism is only part of the picture.“I think the word dialectical is often thrown around by Marxists. A lot of people don't know what it means … put simply, dialectics is looking at contradictions between things. You can't explain the world through one dimensional narratives. There are contradictions. For example, people often talk about the elites versus the people. You hear that a lot with both right and left populist pundits. Marxists wouldn't see it as so simple.”Class struggle is not always vertical. Covid revealed the contradictions within the ruling elite: some capitalists benefited from the pandemic, while others were hurt by it.MMT’s explanation of the role of taxes gets pushback from some who call themselves socialists. If we don’t need their tax dollars to pay for federal programs, are we letting the rich off the hook? Tony says taxing the rich can be used to reduce inequality, but it doesn’t touch the root of the problem. We’re not going to solve capitalism through taxation.The interview covers a range of topics, from cryptocurrency to Chris Hedges – all through the double lens of Marxism and MMT.(If you liked this episode, check out Steve’s interview with Nathan Tankus. It’s from 2017 and still relevant.)Bio: Tony runs the YouTube channel 1Dime, where he makes leftist video essays and short documentaries that use ideas from Critical Theory, philosophy, and political economy to deconstruct hot socio-political topics. Notable 1Dime videos include "The Deficit Myth: The Biggest Lie in Politics", "The Burnout Society", "Planet of the Robots: Four Futures of Automation", and "The Socialism of Warren Buffett: How the Stock Market Works." He also runs a podcast called 1Dime Radio with similar content in audio form.@TheRapNerd7 on Twitter

**There’s a transcript accompanying every episode of Macro N Cheese. You'll also find links to other resources on the Extras page. Go to realprogressives.org.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/ **Alexander Valchyshen brings special knowledge of both economics and conditions in Ukraine. He’s a PhD student under Scott Fullwiler and has more than twenty years of experience in Ukraine’s banking and financial markets, so he has a point of view that the US public rarely hears. Given the current geopolitical conflict, Steve wanted to fill the gaps in his knowledge of Alexander’s homeland. It’s no surprise that social media and the major news organizations are unreliable.“As I said, it's a pretty difficult time. But at the same moment, this is a very crucial moment not only for Ukraine itself, for its existence, because we have to understand Ukraine as a sovereign country in every possible sense of that word, not only in the political terms, but also in the economic terms.”Some of what Alexander describes is very familiar, including the discrepancy between what Ukrainian policy makers understand and their public stance as fiscal conservatives. Alexander goes into some detail about the handling of budget deficits by turning to foreign markets.“I tend to differentiate between currency and money units of account ... What makes Ukraine vulnerable and weak is that historically, as many other countries, there has been instability, there has been a period of hyperinflation and people developed this habit to find a rescue in foreign money. And there is widespread usage of foreign money of account in this economy.”The episode looks at both the history and current conditions of Russia and Ukraine. At a time when most of the news from that part of the world is weighted with emotion and skewed by complex, often obscured interests, we're bringing you a perspective you may not be accustomed to.Alexander Valchyshen is a Research Fellow at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity and an interdisciplinary Ph.D. student in the Economics department of UMKC, under the supervision of Dr. Scott Fullwiler. He holds an M.S. in Economic Theory and Policy (2019) from the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He completed his Master’s thesis under the supervision of Dr. L. Randall Wray and Dr. Jan Kregel. He has more than 20 years of experience in Ukraine’s banking and financial markets, including with some of Ukraine’s major banks and financial firms.During 2016-17, Alexander supervised a team of Ukrainian translators, who translated two books by Dr. Wray―Modern Money Theory and Why Minsky Matters―into Ukrainian. In the Fall of 2018, he held the position of visiting instructor of Finance at Bard College, and taught its Financial Management course to undergraduate students, supervised by Dr. Pavlina Tcherneva.@AlexValchyshen on Twitter

**Every episode of Macro N Cheese has a full transcript and an “extras” page with links to additional resources. Find them at realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/Fadhel Kaboub introduces us to the best people, including Yeva Nersisyan, a Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity who joined Steve to talk about a paper she recently co-authored with Randall Wray, "Are We All MMTers Now? Not So Fast."The COVID pandemic has put MMT in the news, with plenty of critics mistaking stimulus spending with “MMT policy.” This absurdity creates a convenient narrative for detractors: MMT is a failure!Our argument was that MMT-inspired fiscal policy is targeted fiscal spending and in particular spending on jobs. Job creation, the job guarantee that Pavlina Tcherneva has been talking a lot about... a jobs policy rather than just indiscriminate stimulus kind of policy.MMT economists were not at the table when COVID stimulus policy was being decided, nor were they at the table when Larry Summers and Jason Furman were crafting the inadequate response to the global financial crisis – another missed opportunity for fiscal policy to serve the public good.Yeva describes the different government responses to World Wars One and Two, compares Keynesian and MMT-prescribed policies, and lays out the consequences to the states – AKA the race to the bottom – when the federal government shirks its responsibilities.In the second half of the episode Steve brings up the roles of the Fed, Treasury, and private banks and asks Yeva to take us through their processes and explain reserve accounting. If you’re at all confused about this, you’ll want to hear what she says.Yeva Nersisyan is a Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity and an Associate Professor of economics at Franklin and Marshall College. She received her B.A. in economics from Yerevan State University in Armenia, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in economics and mathematics from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her research interests include monetary theory, financial instability and regulation and macroeconomic policy. Yeva has published a number of papers on the topics of shadow banking, fiscal policy, government deficits and debt, financial fragility and instability, financial reform and retirement policy.

Steve’s guest is Dr. Ruchira Sen who got her PhD at UMKC where she studied with a number of friends of this podcast. Herresearch areas are in feminist economics, informed by institutional economics, MMT, and Marxian economics. She describes an economy built on the backs of women, that exists outside the normal parameters of capitalism while making it possible for capitalism to thrive.We've had neoliberal reforms since the 1990s, which has meant a gradual withdrawal of the state from almost everything. And that has specifically impacted the lives of women. Because when the state withdraws from providing you basic services like water, electricity, then it's usually the women who become additionally burdened...The participation of women in the (paid) labor force is declining, their contribution to unpaid work is phenomenal.In a country as massive as India, with a population of around a billion, any change in government policy can have far-reaching and unexpected consequences. Ruchira describes the effects of the 2016 demonetization action, in which two currency notes – of the most widely used denominations – were taken out of circulation. Among a population where the majority of individual financial transactions are conducted in cash and many don’t have bank accounts, this “decashification” caused widespread suffering for the poor and working class.Steve asks Ruchira what drives poverty in India and she talks about British colonial policy and the deindustrialization of the Ganges plain. Poverty is essentially a result of the pushing of capitalist relations onto our population. Not to say that there was no hunger before but the colonial power imposed selective tariff policies on Indian textiles...They pretty much decimated the artisan population in the Gangetic Plains and destroyed much of local industry. That resulted in large bodies of people who were dispossessed. They had nothing but their labor and they became the proletariat. I think it's pretty fundamental to how colonialism works because you need general labor-ready bodies to do the work, to produce the exports that your home country needs, to produce the wealth that your home country will drain away.Ruchira talks about the pervasive threat of violence against women in India, and what she calls a watershed moment – the Nirbhaya Incident and anti-rape agitation. She talks about the left, including some active communist parties that have had successes but have also made questionable choices on occasion. And she talks about India’s lack of energy and food independence.Dr. Ruchira Sen is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Jindal School of Journalism and Communication at O.P. Jindal Global University in India. She teaches macroeconomics, data analysis for storytelling, and data journalism. Her PhD in economics is from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Ruchira is primarily concerned with low paid and unpaid labor in various fields from housework and marriage to the media. She has written on dowry as a gift system in South Asia and how it relates to violence, and on international networks of care and how they impact the USA. Her recent research is on mediated activism in India. Ruchira is primarily informed by an international post-colonial feminist view of the world by MMT and Marxism.@RuchiraSen67 on Twitter

This week’s episode is another chapter in our mission to educate ourselves about modern China. Yan Liang specializes in Modern Money Theory, international trade and finance, and economic development, with a special regional focus on China. She is also the wife of friend-of-the-podcast Eric Tymoigne.Steve and Yan discuss the truth and misconceptions about the ongoing competition between the US and China. It has created winners and losers, with the working class in both countries affected by globalization. Trade war is class war.The explanation for China’s growth is sometimes attributed to market reform and opening itself to trade, but Yan points to the role of the state in financing development, formulating industrial policies, and building infrastructure, both hard and soft. Policymakers are beginning to tighten the grip on private enterprise as they plan to grow China in a more sustainable way, unlike in the past, where extensive growth was a major driving force.US officials pay lip service to job creation while ceding power to private corporations. Steve compares the role of government:It seems like in China it's a little bit more egalitarian. The wealth gap is not as severe, and there is more universal opportunity at some level for leading a life without the precarity. Everything seems to be taken care of with a mindset of empowering and improving the lives of Chinese citizens.Market reform brought about widening inequality in China, between urban and rural, and between east and west. But public healthcare and pensions guarantee certain protections and the Ji Xinping administration’s “common prosperity” policies are further addressing inequality.There is a crackdown in the tech sector; they are trying to solve the so called three mountains on people's back: education, housing, and healthcare. So, this idea of common prosperity is really trying to elevate even more that egalitarianism that I think gradually eroded in China because of market reform and opening up.This interview looks at China’s use of capital controls, its shift to sustainability, and the role of Taiwan as a focal point for US economic interests and propaganda (and its strategic position in the semiconductor industry.) They talk about the meaning of human rights, which is seen by the Chinese as the right to a livelihood and freedom from poverty.Finally, Yan talks about the possibility of the Chinese accepting MMT and how it would affect the respective roles of central and regional governments.Yan Liang is Peter C. and Bonnie S. Kremer Chair, Professor of Economics and Chair of International Studies at Willamette University. She is also a Research Scholar at the Global Institute of Sustainable Prosperity. Yan specializes in Modern Money Theory, International Trade and Finance, Economic Development, with a special regional focus on China.@YanLian31677392 on Twitter

What do you know about modern China? Is it capitalist? Socialist? What do those terms mean in today’s global economies? According to Steve’s guest Vincent Huang, China considers itself “a socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics.” In this episode, Vincent tells Steve how this socialist market economy plays out in Chinese society, and how it compares to the world we know in the US – and just about everywhere else. There’s a stark difference in the power wielded by corporations, for example. In China...The state is the representative, it's the agent that mediates the conflicts between the corporations and the working class. So that actually is quite important because for China's socialist market economy, the goal is to elevate the well-being of people. And the means could be marketization, could be liberalization, could be market-oriented reforms, but it doesn't have to be.American listeners may be surprised by the people’s faith in government. When comparing public versus private, whether in schools or housing construction, Chinese citizens tend to trust the public, because there’s no profit motive involved.Vincent, who got his PhD at University of Missouri - Kansas City, is an MMTer. He and Steve discuss the attitude towards deficits, the role of endogenous money, and China’s infrastructure policies. They talk about what it means for China to be the world’s manufacturer. Steve asks about the possibility of a job guarantee.In a sense, the obstacle for China to implement a job guarantee also depends on how successful its already established projects are in absorbing excess labor ... And frankly, if they do a good job already and there is no need for a job guarantee anymore, then that's perfectly fine.This episode looks at China’s treatment of ethnic minorities, its commitment to transitioning to green energy, and the agility with which the government shifts between regulation and leniency with private corporations. The latter appears to be based on social and economic outcomes. Vincent explains that the attitude toward the public good is tied to the relationship between individual rights and collective order.“In fact, your individual freedom can only be viable and real when a collective order is in place.”Vincent (Yijiang) Huang is a Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity and a Teaching Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Denver. He received his Ph.D. in Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. His research and teaching interests include Money & Banking, Green Job Guarantee, Political Economy of China, Comparative Economic Systems, and Trade Wars & Agreements.

**Have you seen the Rogue Scholar, Steve Grumbine’s new brown bag lunch show on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at noon EST? For interviews, commentary, and, of course, MMT, go to Real Progress in Action on YouTube.Newcomers to MMT tend to draw a blank when they are told that taxes drive the currency or taxes created the first unemployed person. After all, none of that seems to track with the way they personally experience taxes. Warren Mosler makes sense of it by starting with the money story, using the example of colonial currency. The British wanted workers on African coffee plantations, but people were not clamoring to be hired. So, they created a coin or scrip and levied a hut tax payable in the new currency.The public purpose behind what the British were doing was to grow coffee. They levied a tax. They put a tax liability on everyone's house. That caused lots of people to be looking for work or look for some way to earn scrip so they could pay the tax so their house wouldn't be burned down ... It's just a tax liability. Nobody has any yet. Those are called unemployed. And so, the hut tax created unemployment.Some of the scrip was used to pay taxes and the rest became the money supply in the local economy. The British did not collect taxes to accrue currency for payroll, just as the US did not need to collect taxes (or borrow dollars from China) in order to distribute COVID stimulus checks.By getting the sequence all wrong, mainstream economic models cannot arrive at correct solutions. It leads to hyperbolic predictions of the US becoming like Greece (Venezuela? Zimbabwe? The Weimar Republic?), appealing to the IMF on bended knee.This week’s Macro N Cheese is the recording of Warren Mosler’s January 5th presentation to members of the US Green Party, hosted by Real Progressives. The episode includes excerpts from the Q&A following his talk. He explains why a sovereign currency is a public monopoly, discusses the policy implications of the money sequence, debunks misconceptions about the Federal Reserve, and defines the “national debt.”The full two-hour session is available at Real Progress in Action on YouTube.Warren Mosler is an American economist and theorist, and one of the leading voices in the field of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Presently, Warren resides on St. Croix, US Virgin Islands, where he owns and operates Valance Co., Inc. He is the author of “The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy” and “Soft Currency Economics,” which are available on his website.moslereconomics.com@wbmosleron Twitter# MMT #inflation #Fed #debt #deficit #Treasury #China #trade #currency #money

Macro N Cheese devotes considerable attention to ecological economics and environmental justice. We’re always working to expand our understanding of both. Dr. Hail connects the dots between environmental sustainability and the broader public purpose. It’s a focus of his new podcast, “Modern Money Doughnut”.But that's done best of all in Kate's book, when she talks about the doughnut, when she talks about moving away from growthism, from pursuing the growth of GDP as though that is an end in itself, and towards identifying those things which ought to be true of a successful society that provides everybody with the best possible chance of living a secure and safe and rewarding, engaged, empowered life while living within those planetary boundaries.By expanding our scope, the problems appear more complex and vast but, paradoxically, everything starts to make more sense. The goal cannot be just to clean up the planet. If we want to sustain and prolong life on this planet, shouldn’t it be a life worth living, free of exploitation and inequality? Isn’t it kind of like trying to solve healthcare without addressing health?Steven Hail, along with others such as our recent guest Phil Lawn, has been working to bring MMT to ecological economists. At one point there was a danger of people seeing MMT as just a more efficient way of growing the economy faster.Steve Grumbine first heard the term “degrowth” from Steven Hail at the 2018 MMT conference in New York City. Hail says at the time he wasn’t necessarily talking about decreasing the GDP, but about living within our planetary boundaries.Or to put it another way, to a situation in the future where we are obeying Herman Daly's three principles of sustainability, not emitting waste like carbon dioxide more rapidly than the environment can safely absorb it, not using up renewables like fish in the sea faster than our environment can renew those resources. And not using non renewables like lithium that you're digging out from under the ground at a rate which is faster than you can develop renewable alternatives for them.When it comes to the need to reduce the GDP, Hail says he’s agnostic. Clearly, only a tiny minority benefit from its growth. Grumbine brings up the inadequacies of the GDP as a measure of those things or activities we value. Cleaning up an oil spill increases the GDP. Hail says “We don’t value a forest in GDP until we cut it down” and goes on to talk about the history of the GDP and our worship of it. They also discuss alternative measures like the Genuine Progress Indicator and the dashboard approach Jason Hickel spoke of in a recent Macro N Cheese episode.We saw a decrease in carbon emissions in 2020 (thanks, COVID!) but now we’re approaching the global peak again – about seven times as high as in 1950. Hail says we’ve been talking about carbon emissions for 30 years and at this point it’s not enough to get them to fall, we need to get them down to zero.We're not cutting them at all at the moment. And the message of lots of people, the Mark Diesendorfs of this world, even the Kate Raworths of this world, is that we have the technology so that we could do this. Can we do it within capitalism? Jason Hickel would say no. I think probably Bill Mitchell would say no.Hail is known to be optimistic. His message of hope is that we have the science and resources to live within biophysical boundaries while meeting the needs of the people. How will we make that happen? He admits he may soon find himself in the streets with Extinction Rebellion.Steven Hail is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Torrens University, having previously been a Lecturer in the School of Economics at the University of Adelaide. He is the author of Economics for Sustainable Prosperity. Find the Modern Money Doughnut podcast and Dr. Hail’s other work at Modern Money Lab.@StevenHailAus on Twitter#biophysical #ecological #MMT #Kelton #Raworth #Mazzacuto #Hickel #environment #IPCC