A new commentator has said this morning:
Thanks to your writings on this blog, I am interested in learning about modern monetary theory in some detail. Doubtless your “The Joy of Tax” will contain a fair bit about it (and I will be getting my hands on a copy as soon as I can), but can you recommend any other books on the subject of MMT for the (mathematically literate, in my case) layman? For that matter, do you by chance have any other texts you regard as essential for non-specialists? Thank you very much.
A reading list is one of those things I keep on thinking of doing, and don't achieve.
I know we have been here before. But suggestions please? And maybe they could then go in the Wiki (which is another thing I mean to do, and don't get round to doing).
I would nominate my own books. But what then?
Steve Keen, Debunking Economics is my first choice for the vaguely mathematically literate.
Now, what would you add? I don't want to dominate this, partly for my own interest.
And is there a volunteer who might then like to write it all up? I would be happy to include links to a vendor, but not Amazon, for obvious reasons. Waterstones would do for me: at least it keeps books on the High Street as well.
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Modern Money Theory by L. Randall Wray
Reclaiming the State by William Mitchell and Thomas Fazi
7 Deadly Innocent Frauds by Warren Mosler (pdf book available free online)
Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
available for free download here https://archive.org/details/revhosatx67
Graeber is not an MMT academic. He’s not an economist, but an anthropologist, and his book neither does, nor claims to, inform anyone about MMT.
The only take away you need from Graeber is the evidence that ‘barter’ as a monetary system, contrary to the mainstream garbage, has never existed. Which just confirms what MMT already knew.
Money has always been a credit based system. Tax credits in fact.
Can I be clear, I am looking for broader reading ideas – I think open mindedness important
Fair enough Richard, but I took the primary interest of the enquirer to be MMT.
People might at least make clear whether their suggestions are MMT or ‘other’.
J is for Junk Economics by Michael Hudson.
Hudson is a *political economist* – by his own description. He neither does, nor claims to, teach MMT. An interesting guy, but not an MMT learning source. There are much better.
I was not only looking for MMT reading
Hudson has real value
Sure, he does Richard, but understanding the monetary system mechanics, as provided by MMT, is the essential foundation for all of it.
We have *monetary economies*, man made, not in any way ‘natural’ in construction. To drive a car, you must understand what things like a throttle, brakes, and a steering wheel do. This is what MMT provides. No more, no less.
If people don’t understand this, then they have no foundation with which to understand which parts of ‘political economy’, or its authors’, are based on reality, or the bullshit fiction which infects the entire mainstream (or some other even worse drivel), and has done since the year dot, whether ‘left’ or ‘right’ politically orientated in expression.
MMT is apolitical, it’s a system description, plus a set of rather obvious operating protocols to maximise (real) output and stability, regardless of private/public provision preference in the economy.
Richard A. Werner, “Can banks individually create money out of nothing? – The theories and the empirical evidence”, in ‘International Review of Financial Analysis’, Volume 36, December 2014, (2014); pp.1—19.
Werner is a ‘PositiveMoney’ clown, and fails to understand the banking or monetary economy properly.
He is not in any way an MMT source.
Did you not read the question asked asked above, not understand it, or just want to peddle PM’s drivel, and confuse the enquirer?
He focuses on empirical evidence; something that is supposed to count in a “science”. But as a self-proclaimed expert on economics, Mr Hall perhaps you do not do science. You certainly give me no reason whatsoever to value your opinion.
Provide a case for your opinion, if you have one (and not mere gratuitous insults against Werner, who is not here to defend himself); that is the only thing that is of any material interest to me, or that is persuasive.
But I also doubt Richard Werner’s conclusions on occasion – finding them very hard to understand how they follow from his work
I commend the idea of providing a reading list, but are we establishing an open-ended approach to knowledge, or establishing some kind of absolute textual authority. The danger here is we turn science into ideology. It seems to me that economics is already too subject to ideology.
I note Richard, you disagree with Werner “on occasion”, and you have doubts. Fair point, but this also implies you do not disagree with Werner about everything. I do not think anyone is 100% right; about anything. I am a pragmatist. Does it work? Does it illuminate?
I don’t agree with myself over time!
Sometimes in the short term 🙂
Randall Wray’s introductory text; Modern Monetary Theory and Practice is the best place to start. I read Keen’s book first and Mark Harvey’s second but I would do it in reverse order if I had known what I know now. The 2010 Conference 10 videos on You Tube were also part of my beginning info.
This:
http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2018/05/05/the-case-for-a-job-guarantee-in-the-uk/
And BTW no advanced math is necessary.
I always think this from the Bank of England can be regarded as an ‘essential text’:
“Regarding whether taxation is necessarily required to finance government spending, the answer is no, it is not. Along with raising money via taxation, governments can borrow money and they can create money outright.”
http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2017/09/19/the-bank-of-england-admits-monetary-policy-does-not-work/
Anything by Milton Friedman, or just watch his simple explanations on youtube.
So long as you appreciate just about every element is based on falsehoods
Please correct me if I’m wrong but my understanding of Friedman runs a little like this, ( I paraphrase from something I read years ago):-
Imagine the economy is like a balloon and the money supply is like the air inside it. Monetary theory says that if you keep blowing into the balloon then it will keep inflating and ultimately burst. Now you may be thinking, “But surely the economy is nothing at all like a balloon, surely its like lots of people exchanging goods and services both here and abroad”, and you’d be right. But that has never stopped an economist like Milton Friedman.
Milton’s great genius was to flog his balloon theory to political leaders and right-wing dictators across the globe. The fact that the price was massive unemployment and the destruction of industry didn’t matter at all. For economists it’s the theory that matters, not the practice, and where that’s concerned, Milton was one of the greatest economists of all.
RIP Milton 1912 – 2006 – He died, content one year before biggest financial crash since 1929. Some legacy, thanks Milton.
How deep do you want to dive in? For doctoral level reading, below is a link to New Economics Perspectives that can provide for the PhD folks:
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/mmt-scholarship
Steven Hail suggested this list. There are some Amazon links on the webpage though
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/mmt-scholarship
The quite (imho) brilliant: ”23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism” by Ha-Joon Chang.
Also from Steven Hail:
“Might I be permitted to suggest my book, which comes out in mid-July. It is called Economics for Sustainable Prosperity, but much of it is putting MMT into context, and contrasting it with orthodox neoclassical macro. And it has some maths, albeit not too much. https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319909806“
https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-modern-monetary-theory-72095
and
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319909806
The best and most thorough source blog on MMT, for a general (if reasonably educated) audience, as it was intended to be by the MMT academics, is Prof Bill Mitchell’s blog.
Clearly written, often in a ‘case study’ style commentary, but with embedded links to further explainers, it is easily the most comprehensive. Tho’ UMKC’s own blog, New Economic Perspectives, is a good compliment to Bill’s blog.
There is a great deal on youtube, that is excellent, and very helpfully aimed at at a lay or novice audience as well.
Watch anything featuring Warren Mosler. Warren has had a career in finance and banking at the operations level, he knows it inside out. Warren’s grasp – and clear explanations – of market functioning, monetary and otherwise, and the all important power relationships in them, is pure gold (if you’ll excuse my reference to the shiny stuff some people pretend is ‘money’). Warren is *precise*, and usually clear and concise, in everything he says. I doubt Warren has ever been wrong on the subject of money, or how a monetary economy works.
Stephanie Kelton, Randall Wray, Fadhel Kaboub are great speakers on MMT imho. (There are others, but these stand out for me.)
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/
Pavlina Tcherneva is probably the most comprehensive on the Job Guarantee, aside from Bill Mitchell, who brought it into MMT thru’ his early academic studies on buffer stocks.
https://www.pavlina-tcherneva.net/job-guarantee
Finally, we put a somewhat random selection from the masses of material available online on MMT, as a pinned post on our US based facebook group here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/MMTforRP/permalink/1795759297404333/
I have to disagree
I doubt I have ever made it to the end of one of Bill’s blogs they are so tediously long without good reason
And his writing style is dire
Fair enough, that’s a personal thing. I must like dire reading, as I got most of my grounding from Bill Mitchell 😀
Lots of good suggestions so not much more to add. Unfortunately many of the authors are not natural communicators hence the info is quite difficult to assimilate for laypeople, such as myself; Bill MItchell being the prime example. I rather like J D Alt’s contributions. Being an architect and not an economist gives him a slightly different style. His excellent YouTube presentation has been frequently posted here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHQCjFebIf8). This is a recent essay – http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2018/02/shift-understanding-using-americas-fiat-money.html.
More original UK material would be welcome.
PS : Has anyone mentioned this basic web guide? https://modernmoneybasics.com
Hmmm……sorry to jump in but in order help understand MMT you need something to compare and contrast it against – something that looks at the current orthodoxy and calls it out.
So I would recommend Mark Blyth’s ‘Austerity – The History of a Dangerous Idea’ as part of one’s wider reading – you couldn’t get a bigger contrast between MMT and current economic practice than this in my view. Blyth writes well.
I think that it is fair to say that interest in MMT has grown because of austerity.
It is true that many books mentioned here do not mention MMT. But I am quite sure that the reader whose knowledge grows will come to conclusions that will align with the MMT concept.
I found Yanis Varoufakis’s The Global Minotaur a very good read: https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/books/the-global-minotaur/
Amused that whilst Amazon won’t pay you a commission for linking to their bookstore, Waterstones will….. What’s that saying about stones and glass houses again?!!?!
I earn no commission from them
For those who want to go beyond the generalist arguments of MMT and get to the nitty-gritty technical arguments that underlie the logic of MMT both Scott Fullwiller and Eric Tymoigne have toiled industriously to supply these:-
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Scott_Fullwiler
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/money-banking
Just to add to the original plea for help with understanding MMT, has anyone come across anything straightforward that also ties in foreign investment, both inward and outward and how interest on these relates to the rest of the economy? This is a real stumbling block for me so I’d very much appreciate some ideas.
One of the strengths of MMT is that it describes a reality that many who make their living from money recognise, at least in part.
One of the fundamental parts of this world is the Eurodollar system which broke in 2008 and now sort of limps along . Understanding the Eurodollar is in my opinion goes hand in hand with understanding MMT.
I therefore recommend the series of 4 podcasts by Jeffrey Snider, “Eurodollar University”.
I would add The Econocracy by Cahal Moran et al, the economics student group which critiqued economics teaching in the UK.
I positively *enjoyed* reading “Reclaiming the State” by William Mitchell and Thomas Fazi at he end of last year.
I knew nothing about MMT when I started, so I know a little now …
Abba Lerner’s Economics of Employment
MMT in 1951.
Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics. Not MMT but so what.
Roger Hunt and Nick Foster – many thanks for your suggestions. Off I go!