It is only three weeks since my elder son, James, joined the Funding the Future team, but my thinking on a great many issues is developing as a result of his arrival because of the significant extra capacity that we now have to take on a broad range of tasks, aided and abetted by Jacqueline, my wife, who is now involved in more aspects of our work.

ePublishing 

Amongst the things that we are already planning are regular publications. These might include:

• Completed series of blog posts.

• Specific explanations on some key themes such as money, modern monetary theory, bonds, debt and deficits, and the like.

• Specifically reworked publications. The Quantum Economics series is an obvious example because it is something that could quite easily become an e-book, or even a physical publication on a print-on-demand basis.

James is currently leading this work, assisted by Thomas, and I am pretty much leaving them to get on with it right now, having noted that progress is good to date.

YouTube posts

We are also, as some people have suggested we should here, looking at ways in which we can expand our output. One way we might do this is by posting a comment piece on YouTube every day, linked back to a policy post on this blog, with a poll attached to encourage engagement. This will be quite separate from the posting of videos on that platform and will encourage people who are familiar with us there to come and read this blog more often.

An example of such a post, and the resulting poll, was this experimental post put up on YouTube yesterday, based upon my commentary on Rachel Reeves's budget plans, previously published here:

Engagement like that is remarkable. We never get anything like 3,400 people voting on this blog, so the opportunity for outreach is considerable. There have also been 178 comments, and provisional data suggests that there was more engagement with that post than there was traffic on all posts on this blog yesterday.

Twitter

This idea might translate next onto Twitter, or X, as I am still reluctant to call it.

Substack

For exactly the same reason, we are also looking to begin regular posting on Substack, where James may also play an editorial part in our output. The content in question would also refer back to a post here, but will probably be of greater length than the ones put on YouTube. We will be exploring this in due course, but I am encouraged by the fact that I already have more than 3,000 followers on Substack, and I have never actually posted anything of substance there. If Substack has been willing to promote my empty blog to that extent, we do wonder what might happen if we post regular content.

RMQs

Another idea is for the YouTube channel.

I have, for several years, held Zoom meetings for groups who have invited me to speak. As a matter of preference, I tend to keep my time talking to such groups as short as is reasonably possible, leaving plenty of time for questions as a result. These often turn out to be at least as useful as the presentation itself. I also enjoy the process of being challenged and am happy to answer the questions that arise. Based on that, we thought it might be fun to reproduce something along these lines for YouTube.

However, having an open free-for-all which anyone could attend would, whilst technically possible, be immensely difficult to manage, because we are aware that such events often attract trolls who are abusive, not least in the comments that they post while live-casts are running. We do not see any reason for suffering the stress of managing such a situation, and so instead we are looking to record more controlled events.

Thinking about this, we thought that a variation on the idea of the title of  Questions to the Prime Minister might be amusing, and so, recognising the fact that these are invariably referred to as PMQs, we now want to promote a series on YouTube called RMQs, or Questions to Richard Murphy.

In that case, what we are looking for are readers here who would like to:

• Pose a question to me, which we would, admittedly, want to see, at least in outline, in advance.

• Join us for a recording where that question can be posed in person. Ideally, we would like the person to appear on screen, but we are not asking for their full name if they do not wish to share it for any reason. A first name would be sufficient, and for those who cannot appear for good reasons, we could possibly arrange for an actor (otherwise known as one of the team) to pose their question for them.

• Sit through an hour-long recording, and then agree to their part being published.

I would then seek to answer the question, providing an opportunity for a follow-up question if necessary. We will try to address each question in ten minutes at most — and maybe less. With perhaps six people involved in each session, the whole thing would be an hour or less in duration.

Importantly, because we would not do these live, if someone made a mistake, we can always have another go. I do not, almost ever, make a video without some sort of mistake having to be edited out.

I suspect we would not want to do these more than once a fortnight.

So, if you would like to take part, please suggest your question below. Make sure your email is correctly included in the posting details when you post the question so I can contact you. Questions can also be emailed to me. And if you think someone else's question is one you would like to support, give it a like, or say so. Then we will see how this goes.