Some people have been musing on how to rebrand this blog in the comments section over the last day or so. They think it possible that it might have a more alluring name. I'm not sure.
But what I do think we need to do is answer the question I was asked by an audience member last night, which was to find a short metaphor to rebut the household economy narrative.
I admitted I was not sure what that alternative was.
I doubt it is the modern monetary economy.
Nor the state economy.
Is it ‘our economy'?
Or something quite different. Thoughts anyone?
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How about the “Economy Reality blog”.
So0me might argue with that….
Social economy? or ‘Our social economy’?
(i.e. emphasis on managing the economy to benefit our society)
I quite like that
Maybe take a page from Abba Lerner; Functional Finance. Or Functional Social Finance.
But it takes ages to explain what that means….
How about ‘The Fiat Economy’.
We definitely need something that can’t really be misrepresented as something different.
The trouble is that makes me think of clapped out Pandas
Or the paintwork on my campervan.
Its fine, ‘cos its you.
I’d go with something like the stock flow consistent economy. Or do a play on the conservation of mass / energy and go with the conservation of funds. Or balanced sectors economy. At the very least that might help with ideas.
If you have to explain it then it doesn’t work
Societal Economy? Caring Economy? The Giving Economy?
Modern Explanatory Economics? The Modern Pragmatic Economic Explanation?
……
Thanks
I thought the Sovereign Economy.
Now that is good….
Or national economy
which may be bleedin’ obvious, but true
Just describe it what it is – Political Economy.
🙂
Investment Economy
I think an exciting narrative can be written around that, which much more accurately reflects reality than the household narrative. Even the household economy story can be expanded to think of future returns of investing in the people in the household before then dropping the household analogy because of it’s short comings.
I like that
But it may not be quite enough
OK, seriously, which economy are we talking about?
What we have is a successful blog called Tax Research UK. What drew me in was the exposure of the extent of unpaid corporation tax and tax havens. It then expanded its field and became an economic weather vane. So it would not have mattered what the name was, Richard was referred to me as someone who might answer my questions on the economics at work today.
Just a warning, changing a name often results in changing an identity. Its the latter that matters.
If you do change it you can keep the identity by calling Murphy’s Blog.
I’m beginning to think it stays as it is…..
Peoples’ Economics.
I had considered that
How about calling it the “Real Economy?”
This is how it really works.
But the household economy model is also real – for households
How about:
Real Resources Economy
This is what Joe Public think economists are always talking about anyway and it plays into the layman’s desire to focus on prgamatic “real issues”. Most don’t understand that:
a) money isn’t a real resource
b) mainstream economists model the economy as if money doesn’t exist (veil over barter nonsense)
By talking about the real resource Economy we might give ourselves the opportunity to be heard while pointing out the fact that while money is only a social/legal/accounting construct it is nevertheless very important for organising the real resources in our economy.
Effectively money helps us discuss and agree what we’re going to do with available real resources but it isn’t itself one of those real resources. Money is an idea and anything we can do or say to draw attention to this is all for the good.
I would say you can contrast the Real Resource Economy to the Household Economy thus:
Say you lose your job and fail to keep up your mortgage payments while searching fruitlessly for more work. Your money runs out and you are evicted. Does that make any sense or seem fair? You aren’t short of real resources: the walls and roof are still there, your arms and legs still work and you have the same brain you had when you were employed yet now you’re going to be forced to leave your home and seek new shelter. When this happens to a lot of people altogether like in 2008 banks repossess homes and they sit there empty for years.
Clearly only imaginary money has “run out” and households are torn apart and made homeless despite the existence of the real resources to house them and put them to productive work. Obviously this is madness. Why let an jmaginary construct make those who are willing and able to work sit idle out in the rain while real houses and factories stand empty and rotting for want of people to look after them?
Obviously it is better to alter the imaginary construct “money” to ensure people stay in their homes and work than to modify the real resources (via entropy) to suit the lack of imaginary money.
Thanks
Perhaps not quite what you are looking for in relation to the blog but when musing over a possible article about focusing the economy on the welfare of the majority/middle I came up with the term “Medianomics” – it pleased me at any rate 🙂
But then I am a self-confessed nerd, to the extent that today I am wearing an IT Crowd themed t-shirt that proclaims this fact, and will sometimes (annoyingly) observe that people should use mean instead of average – so perhaps the term is too nerdy!
I am not sure what it means though
And I confessed ti being a geek this morning
So it fell at the first hurdle of being understandable!
What it (medianomics) means is economics that is aligned with the interests of the median of the population (on different measures).
I knew there was a reason why I don’t work in marketing or communications!
Crikey – I did not get that
And crikey is a geek word…..
‘The Fair Economy’
Every thing you’ve ever done (including your books) that I have seen seems to promote fairness in human economic relations and networks.
I like that
Investmemt Economics in a Modern Monetary System (can be shortened).
I thought the brand managers ethos is to create it, make it meangingful to customers/clients/participants, then above all protect it. So I suggest Tax Research UK.
All who I have suggested your blog to have read it and commented it was hard work to follow the various lines of logic – meaning they enjoyed the experience including the mental demands made.
Thanks!
Seriously
You can keep the household analogy but build on it.
So the economy is like a household – but a very wealthy one that actually owns its own bank.
The Investing Economy?
Sounds too much like capitalism
The investing economy “Sounds too much like capitalism”
Well it’s ok for capitalist to invest too but as you have pointed out often the money “saved” by individuals isn´t doing any good – it just creates asset bubbles. Sometimes the states fails in its investments (spending) too but people understand the concept of wise investments and recognise the good the state´s investments do. Investment is a much more positive word than spending, and reminds people there is a reward from it.
So the state invests and then taxes.
Btw I don’t think you should change the name of your blog – I think the serious title works. I was only suggesting an alternative to the false household analogy.
I don’t think a change in blog title is likely now – I think it could do more harm than good
The Socially Managed Economy?
Collective economy, or social economy as above both stress the key point that rebuts the household argument: that when a household spends less no one in the household have less income, but when a government spends less people on the society do have less income.
I like social economy
I’m afraid none of the above works for me, Some are good, but they don’t actually bring out the substantive distinctiveness of MMT/MMS.
I do not have a slick offering, so all I can do is express what seems to me the feature of the household that does not and cannot replicate an economy and government, and that makes ‘the household economy’ analogy nonsense:
The Currency Issuing Tax Economy (CITE).
It doesn’t have a ‘ring’ to it (okay, it is leaden), but it allows us to ask the proud householder a couple of basic questions; whose currency do they use to balance their budget?; whose tax do they pay? Do they issue their own currency; if they did would anyone accept it, or pay them tax?
But if it doesn’t kill the household analogy easily it is of little use…
Richard I don’t think anything can kill the household analogy easily – certainly not in a few words. If such a short combination of words existed it would already have been used and the household analogy would already be dead 😉
I fear you may be right
“But if it doesn’t kill the household analogy easily it is of little use…”
What I find hard to come to terms with is how even if people accept the ‘household budget’ analogy they still don’t see how it’s being used against them by the elites.
We have a situation where ‘Father’ has lost everything on the Casino of the markets and his wife and children are going about bare-arsed and shoeless. Fortunately ‘father’ has had a big cash windfall which means he can go back to the casino (and is on a winning streak again).
Meanwhile his wife and children are still going about bare-arsed and shoeless, and also hungry because for some reason THEY have to pay back the lottery windfall. ????
How does this make sense to anybody ? How is a household budget analogy justifying this sort of abuse ?
All who are here, are here either because of, or despite the blog title.
So I don’t think the blog title is a big problem. Though I admit to being agnostic.
Of the above comments I find I’m probably most swayed, by Phil’s reasoning: “I thought the brand managers ethos is to create it, make it meaningful to customers/clients/participants, then above all protect it. So I suggest Tax Research UK.”
On the wider issue, which is quite a separate one of what we call an economic rationale that challenges ‘Neoliberalism’, Of the above offerings the one that resonated with me was Drew’s ‘Sovereign Economy’, but it doesn’t quite hit the spot.
It had me thinking about ‘Modern Sovereign Economics’
As your tax commission submission points out (see, I’ve got a way into it !) it took the BofE 43 years from the ending of the Dollar gold standard to openly admit that a sovereign currency issuer in a fiat currency system is operating in a new economic universe.
And as you further say, the Treasury still doesn’t ‘get it’. (Or pretends not to)
‘Sovereignty’ played well for Brexit, even though voters, and politicians too, didn’t seem to have noticed that the most important aspect of Sovereignty – the ownership of currency – was already in place, making much of the thrust of Brexit utterly pointless.
Democracy is under threat, as the financial levers of power are incrementally taken over by increasingly powerful corporate and financial interests. This is inimical to sovereignty in a very damaging way and governments are losing sway. The government is the expression of a sovereign people (or should be) and governments are giving away the sovereignty of their people because they don’t understand the power vested in them.
So perhaps ”Modern (or ‘New’) Sovereign Economics” would help to stiffen our resolve not to be ‘stiffed’.
Can we rebrand some political phraseology too?
Rather than “it’s the economy, stupid!”
Could we say “it’s the stupid economy”?
🙂
Adam Sawyer says: Can we rebrand some political phraseology too?
I have an additional request. Can we rebrand heterodox economics so that I can understand what the hell it really is?
🙂
“Equinomics”
A good one
Schofield says:
“Equinomics”
That’ll be the application of ‘horse sense’ will it.
By way of clarification….
Horse sense is what prevents horses betting on the human race.
Horse-sense explains their long faces – it is difficult to be both well informed and cheerfully optimistic at the same time 😉
“Equinomics” – achieving equitable economic and social outcomes for all.
derived from equ:-
http://membean.com/wrotds/equ-equal
As far as horses having the sense not to bet on people it would seem they did because they allowed human beings to domesticate them for various perks (advantages) which presumably they judged equitable and they became a main source of augmenting human labour for many centuries.
The fundamental task of “equinomics” is how to domesticate human beings so they have the “human-sense” to work even better together than than the high level they already do to achieve more equitable outcomes for all or more simply greater co-sufficiency!
🙂
Adam Sawyer says:
“Horse-sense explains their long faces…”
Horse goes into a bar and orders a drink. The barman asks, “Why the long face?” The horse says, “Because I’m a horse.”
There is no ‘why’. No explanation necessary (unless you want to get into evolutionary selective pressures) 🙂
First, Richard, thank you so much for your inspiring presentation in Leicester.
As you say, the last question of the evening was about how to counter the government-as-a-household metaphor. The following are two metaphors that I find personally helpful and want to share.
The first metaphor is money as an enzyme and economical production as chemical reaction/production and the economy as the body. For the economy/body to work we need the right amount of enzymes/money. Not enough enzymes/money and production breaks down and the body/economy get ill. On the other hand, an excess amount of enzymes will be removed. The metaphor suggests that we need to find a way of regulating the right amount of enzymes/money in the body/economy. Creating money via private banks and government spending where it is needed and removing it via taxation where it is in excess seems now an entirely plausible thing to do.
The second metaphor is money as a kind of fluid as in many physical or eco systems. For the economy to work, we need money to flow through it. To incentivize and reward innovation we need to allow money to accumulate (like water in a lake that we use as a reservoir for drinking water or as a means of transport). But for the economy to be stable, we need to balance accumulation by an equal amount of redistribution. Again this shows why taxation is needed. It also shows that, like water, while an individual can own a certain amount of money, the money overall can only be owned by the society as a whole and must be managed by the government.
Maybe these metaphors can be made more catchy by saying money-as-vitamin and money-as-water. Now this sounds stupid. But maybe that is also ok. Because it is not more stupid than the way the government-as-a-household metaphor is usually understood.
On the other hand, reading through the comments above, I also like the suggestion to say, yes, government is a household, but a household that owns its own bank.
The comments above also suggest various qualifications of the word “economy”. In Germany we (used to) have “soziale Marktwirtschaft”, social market economy (there is a reasonable wikipedia article about it). It was introduced in the 1950ies, dominated German politics for decades and was taught in schools as the obviuosly best way to run a country. It got out of fashion a bit since, very roughly, the fall of the Berlin wall. I suspect that this is not a coincidence: With the demise of the East German socialist system, the Western governments were not forced anymore to prove to their citizens that capitalism is also better socially than socialism.
Thanks
I like the metaphors
“I like the metaphors”
I do too. And I keep thinking electricity is a better model than water or bloodstreams.
Electricity flows in response to demand, when you plug in an appliance. The rating of the appliance determines how much power is drawn to meet demand.
Doesn’t matter how much electricity you generate it goes nowhere until some body plugs in and switches on to do something.
True
“And I keep thinking electricity is a better model than water or bloodstreams.”
No objections to that. Maybe just to add that when we explain electricity to children in an early science class we sometimes use water as a metaphor to explain elecricity.
Alexander Kurz says:
“…. when we explain electricity to children in an early science class we sometimes use water as a metaphor to explain electricity…..”
Could explain why a lot of people don’t understand electricity. (?) 🙂
Alexander,
I like thinking through different metaphors so thanks for your take on economy as a body.
For me though I see enzymes as only being required in tiny quantities to catalyse a huge boost to chemical reactions. Such a metaphor possibly risks a slide into “wealth creators as enzymes”. Only a tiny number of extraordinary people oragical gold is required to make everything wonderful! (Puke)
For me money is more like an essential component of both the immune system and hormone/nervous systems. Money communicates what is of value in the economy and therefore helps us decide what to create and what to allow to die away.
In the body the nervous/hormone system tells cells what to do and the immune system and each individual cell itself constantly monitors the health (and therefore value to the whole body) of individual cells. If a cell(s) cease to be of value (or become dangerous) then they shut themselves down or are forcibly shut down by the immune system.
This sounds harsh and Darwinian so not healthy as a metaphor either.
I suspect there’s actually no way to come up with a useful body metaphor for the economy. Reason is that the constituent parts of bodies are tied irrevocably into a greater whole that remains largely unchanged for its entire life cycle whereas the constituent parts of an economy can all survive by themselves or go off to form new economies or radically change the economic body of which they are a part during the lifecycle of that economy.
So I would resist the impulse to draw comparisons of this kind because they entail inevitable category errors that could potentially become quite dangerous by playing into various fascistic/communalistic political dogmas which we know tend to end very badly from past experience.
“For me though I see enzymes as only being required in tiny quantities to catalyse a huge boost to chemical reactions.”
Agreed … but we can consider money as a tiny quantity … even trillions of pound are just a few bits among the giant amounts of information that flow through our economy … and let us face it, most of our economy is about information flow as much as it is about the flow of material goods.
I think the other criticism you raise about an economy as body metaphor are more serious. Thanks for pointing them out. But then any metaphor carries only that far, this is also true for the government-as-household metaphor.
Per-lease chaps, Alexander and Adam.
You want to explain this to people who don’t understand percentages ? ….And struggle with the implications of compound interest. And you think explaining in terms of complex biological systems is going to help ? People who think enzymes are the coloured granules in their washing powder…
OK. It’s fun playing with analogies, but…. 🙂
“I suspect there’s actually no way to come up with a useful body metaphor for the economy.”
I think I agree with you on this. And my reply would be that the money-as-enzyme metaphor still works, even without extending it to an economy-as-body metaphor. It could also be renamed money-as-catalyst metaphor, to get it further away from biology.
How about
Sensible economics. – its does what it says on the label.
Similar to the difference of dispensing justice vs the law.
Now they are very different things…
I don’t think we’re going to defeat the “household” metaphor by “re-branding” and certainly not by saying “it’s like a household with its own bank” because people will remember the “household” and forget the “bank”, which will strike many as absurd anyway.
The household metaphor is deeply entrenched and has a kind of empirical resonance: many of us know we can’t spend beyond our means without consequences (yea even to the 7th generation), that credit card debts have to be repaid eventually, so the metaphor sounds “right” and echos the lived experience of so many citizens.
I suggest we just have to keep on keeping on, write to newspapers, MP’s, MSP’s and so on, pointing out the fallacy of the metaphor and challenge the simplistic mantras – “we can’t just throw money at the ….” with reasoned rebuttals pointing out what can be done. And avoid silly phrases like “helicopter” money which I suspect is regarded as dubiously as “magic money tree”.
The hardest task will be to get politicians to start talking in terms of MMS, followed by the BBC and the FT. Personally, I’m not optimistic as too many think Keynes’ suggestion that when the facts change you change your mind anathema and prefer to prove Einstein’s (alleged) definition of insanity “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result”.
Helicopter money and magic money tree are, as you say, similar in style
We just have to plug on plugging on
To counter the simplicity and intuitiveness of the household analogy, you need something equally simple and intuitive.
One very simple analogy is that of a farmer growing seed. Seed and hard work must be invested (first) in order to produce a return each season. Lets say one year, the harvest fails and the farmer has only half the seed to plant the following year (a recession). Should he/she (a) plant half the field to match how much seed they have and gradually work back up over many years or (b) buy (create) more seed to plant the whole field (all the available resource) and a better crop next year? The answer is intuitive and obvious. Then you can substitute seed for money and explain the government creates the seed, the resources of the country is the land – at the moment we are only planting half our field and we’re suffering for it. Link to parable of the sower and you are playing on a deep cultural understanding.
Thats a good analogy the fields. Perhaps with a seed making machine. Also with the half the workers doing nothing when only half the field has been seeded.
As a one time small-farmer I like that. And don’t forget the Corncrake.
Tristram, I find the money-as-seed idea interesting. But can we put taxes in the picture?
Taxes are important, for one thing because the idea of “tax is theft” is still going strong and it needs to be countered.
When I think about money-as-catalyst and money-as-water then this aims at making plausible why taxation is necessary to remove excess money. Basically, while limited accumulation may be beneficial, unlimited accumulation causes a crisis.
Hi Richard,
I thought of this one when listening to a talk on metaphors
a few weeks ago. I think it describes the idea or picture of what MMT can achieve.
It basically is; WIN-WIN-ECONOMICS
you could also add to this with; WIN-WIN-SELF-FUNDING -ECONOMICS
or; WIN-WIN-ECONOMICS FOR EVERYONE, or; WIN-WIN-ECONOMICS FOR ALL.
We must win the metaphor battle.
The opposite of this is the Neo-Lib economics of; RICH-WIN/POOR-LOSE ECONOMICS
or; RICH-WIN/THE-REST-LOSE-ECONOMICS, 1% WIN / 99% LOSE-ECONOMICS
Ron
Apologies for the long-winded comment. It’s just this is a subject I’m struggling with in my own activism locally so it is very important to me. I’m sure many others here are thinking the same thing, I’m not suggesting what I have to say is novel or unknown – merely that it may be useful.
The fundamental reason people cling to the household analogy is because for individual players in the game that is the economy it is familiar and it is true enough at their level of the game.
Understanding the reality of money requires individual players to adopt a different perspective: that of the referees or rule setters for the game.
Problem is the average person has zero experience of (and little time or capacity to imagine) this alternative perspective. Furthermore asking Joe Public to reconsider the nature of money is expecting them to revisit a question to which they are certain they already know the answer. Why should they waste their time on such a fruitless exercise?
Reframing the debate requires that we shift from the micro to the macro frame. Getting people to do that mental processing requires we give them good cause to do so.
To my mind this boils down to two broad approaches to raising people’s consciousness:
1) Asking people simple questions like “where do pounds sterling come from?”, “What is the purpose of money?”, “How would you operate im a world without money?”, “What gives money its value?”. This triggers an awareness that they don’t fully understand money and may motivate them to think further.
2) Identifying familiar microeconomic phenomena which jar with the common-sense view about money as a commodity OR as part of a flawless system. Economic depressions are the obvious example – like I said in an earlier post: you have to down tools and abandon your home for NO REAL REASON! This is both surprising and motivational. The fact no-one is ever told they cannot access their deposit account because the money has been lent put us another. The seeming inexplicable circularity of the promise to pay on our currency is another.
I would hazard a guess that there is a second big stumbling block for nuanced understandings of complex realities beyond the fact most already think their simplistic understanding is sufficient. That is that complex abstract ideas are frequently beyond the average cognitive capacity for our population. This is obviously a controversial and unsettling statement but that doesn’t prove it to be false.
If true it means anyone trying to convince the masses of a “complex and counterintuitive truth” faces a terrible uphill battle if others are trying to convince the masses of a contradictory “simple and obvious truth”. This certainly seems consistent with our experience of “selling MMT”.
Here we run into the Dunning Kruger effect. Those currently without the capacity to understand DO NOT REALISE they do not have the capacity to understand. Further they will become insulted and actively hostile if we suggest they do not understand something they really truly believe they do already get. To make it even harder for us money is inextricably wrapped with social status and so any implication that someone doesn’t understand money is more insulting than say the suggestion they don’t understand photosynthesis.
A second failure of comprehension presents a major stumbling block for us. This is people’s blindness to history and to the gradual process of change. People cannot comprehend the modern world because it is too vast, too complex and too complicated. However, neither can they look back to a simpler past and use that as any guide because:
a) they are largely unaware of the realities of the past and
b) even when they are familiar with SOME aspects of life in the past they tend to project modern ideas and technologies back onto the imagined past.
This is best exemplified by the simplistic and entirely erroneous mainstream economics view of the evolution of money:
Barter => Commodity Money => Credit Money
A dim awareness of this among the masses causes people to believe things like “the gold standard is the older, safer more tried and tested way of doing things”. Witness Positive Money’s success in motivating people to get behind the idea of making banks operate how they intuitively think banks should operate. I believe they’re successful in part because they rely on an appeal to familiarity but also in an appeal to concepts of what’s old and true and tested.
The fact that in reality money is and always has been debts and credits (IOUs) escapes most people and makes us mistakenly believe modern banking is something wholly new, unreliable and uncontrollable. Truth is it is merely the logical extension of personal credit relations that are likely as old as our species.
Therefore I like to cut out all the modern complexities and ask people to consider how a neolithic village at the dawn of the agricultural age would be able to organise themselves. I like to reference the well researched Dunbar number as backup to a model of small human societies where everyone is known to everyone else and therefore personal credit systems can operate based entirely on personal trust without any need for trusted third parties (banks or states).
I think it is only possible to break through the household analogy by getting normal people to consider a simple system that they are capable of understanding quickly. From that point of common understanding it is possible to build up a nuanced understanding of our modern money system. I believe going into it from higher levels leaves lay-audiences in a state of confusion and lacking the intuitive understanding required to easily grasp the reality of our modern system.
I know this because I struggled immensely myself till I imagined the simplest of societies and how they might operate. Reading David Graeber’s book Debt the First 5,000 Years helped me a lot too.
Very thoughtful piece, Adam.
I don’t know to what extent you have nailed ‘the answer’, but you certainly have a fairly comprehensive take on the question.
I thank you for sharing your thoughts and observations.
“Understanding the reality of money requires individual players to adopt a different perspective: that of the referees or rule setters for the game. Problem is the average person has zero experience of (and little time or capacity to imagine) this alternative perspective.”
I think that can be countered. Most people have experience as rule setters in some form, for example as parents or teachers.
The basic neo-liberal ethics is that everybody should be allowed to behave in a way that egotistic childern do. All parents know that this does not work. And we make it a priority for our children to learn, not necessarily to obediently follow the rules, but to understand that it is beneficial for everybody to agree on rules and then keep them. Moreover, we all know that in order to achieve something great (eg winning the World Cup or running a health service) individual talent is not enough, coordinate action and planning is also important.
So what kind of agreement and coordination do we need for an economy that works for everybody? Certainly, we do not want a completely government planned and controled economy. But neither should we allow a tiny number of egotistic billionaires to run the show. (I also think of Golding’s Lord of the Flies here.)
That should be pretty obvious to most. Then the question is what are the rules we should agree on? Certainly, the current rules do not work. Again most people would agree, I suppose.
Of course, then the real work only starts, so I do not claim to have a solution … just some thoughts …
Now you are challenging neoliberalism to its core
How dare you suggest football is a team game?
Carry on….!
“Now you are challenging neoliberalism to its core. How dare you suggest football is a team game? Carry on….!” 🙂
When I mentioned the World Cup, I was thinking of the laments one reads now again about why Germany is always doing well in the big tournaments. The story behind this is that Germany was so bad in the late 90ies that they decided to radically redesign their approach to how to organise football on the national level. But there is something more interesting about football and neo-liberalism.
Football is an excellent example for a market that fails their customers, the fans. Ticket prices are going up, beautiful old stadiums are dismantled and replaced by lifeless executive-style palasts, players and managers move so quickly that it becomes more and more difficult to identify with a club, etc. To a great extend this is driven by rising salaries for players, who would also play for much less. So what drives this process? This is really nice example for the bad effects of (too much) competition.
The football market would work much better, if competition was more controled. This has been recognised by the UEFA Financial Fair Play Regulations, but they do not go far enough and are not even enforced.
As an aside, interestingly, much stricter spending caps are implemented in the USA, in basketball, for example.
So, yes, football is not only a team sport, but also a good example of a market that would work much better if it was better regulated.
(I am not suggesting that the government should step in here. But I would like to see even more organised resistance by the fans.)
Agreed
Equinomics is nice and the metaphors are great but it’s got be something simple. Right wingers get their simple messages, slogans and talking points and repeat them constantly and we need to do the same.
I think the Unlimited Money Economy or something like that would be good as it would pique interest and invite immediate questions.
“Unlimited Money Economy” misses out on an important bit: if money could be unlimited we wouldnt need to tax, we could just keep increasing it
We can’t: we would have excessive inflation
OK lots of this is sounding a little heterodoxical, interesting and perplexing, but not all that useful. Allow to state my major reservation: the absence of the word “demand”. In teh 50 years since I graduated this has increasingly retreated from the vocabulary, especially at the macro level.
However, at the micro/organisational level, unless your theory and models begin with a study of demand you may as well just go home as you will be of no use to any service or production system private or public.
Does that help?
Good point
John Carlisle says:
“…. the absence of the word “demand”. ”
It’s only the word that’s missing though.
This is where I think the electricity analogy is useful, because until there is demand nothing moves.
You have a dirty carpet, you decide it needs a whizz over with the vacuum cleaner.
You’ve identified the demand (dirty carpet)
You’ve identified the mechanism for dealing with the demand (Vacuum cleaner)
Now all you need is the vacuum cleaner (industrial and manufacturing plant) and the electricity to power it.
The money represents the power to acquire/build the vacuum cleaner and the power to make it work.
Or you could use a brush and dustpan I suppose.
If you had them. Because they don’t come free either.
The weakness of the water flow analogy is that it assumes you need to fill a header tank before you can start………. so we’d better start by collecting some sweat droplets (?)
yes, money-as-electricity works well with demand, I agree … and the vacuum cleaner story is nice … could be used on the doorstep, I suppose …
“…..the vacuum cleaner[…] … could be used on the doorstep, I suppose … ”
Not recommended if it’s raining 🙂
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