I did a live stream with Steve Keen and friends yesterday evening.
We covered a lot of ground, criticising neoliberalism and addressing much more.
You can see it all here - and some of the best is towards the end.
I do not have a transcript, and it would be far too long to use.
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Presumably the ‘friends’ were Mr. Keen’s.
Yes
Much truth about Oxford grads being arrogant… when I’m on the high IQ forums and I see a certain blend of arrogance and ignorance being spouted, I think to myself; “Qxford man there!” and invariably, I’m right.
A brilliant 2 hours, well done to everyone. Richard, I missed the name of the young labour MP who Steve mentioned, who may or may not become a future chancellor, can you help.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_Yang_(politician)
A PPE from Oxford BUT co-founded Rethinking Economics.
The sort of economist we need and she’ll be aware of the shortcomings of usual PPE mafia.
Okay Richard, thank you.
And she’s a Quaker …
Two and a half minutes of lead in is too much (in my opinion).
Richard, many good points. Tough to pick the best, but I think the power of narrative was the most important!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeeZ5rZnL60&t=6255s
A number of historical precedents come to mind that the public can easily follow and be persuaded by:
There are two great descriptions of the economic miracle of WW2 which lasted until the 70’s
1. Pulitzer winner and presidential biographer Professor Doris Goodwin
The Way We Won: America’s Economic Breakthrough During World War II
https://prospect.org/health/way-won-america-s-economic-breakthrough-world-war-ii/
2. The Lesson Of World War II Robert Hockett – another guest of Keen
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rhockett/2021/11/12/war-on-inflation-part-1-the-lesson-of-world-war-ii/
3. Law Professor Christine Desan uses the remarkable narrative of Lincon’s Greenbacks
https://youtu.be/Nr9-pKhus90?t=5704.
Benjamin Franklin and Colonial money is another great history lesson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrkTZJ1pGUM&t=4s
Joe
Many thanks
And much to watch
Richard
Richard you said in the video you only spend 30 hours a week on the blog. I would have guessed 60 with the volume of material you write and read and record!!
I spend at least 35 on other things as well.
This is not sustainable, I know.
In the video you said money created by the government is capital and the more capital we have the stronger the system is withstand shocks. In contrast to your view that government spending creates the capital to help us deal with emergencies, Darren Jones tweeted:
“The reserve – our country’s overdraft – is money put aside each year for emergencies. The Tories blew the whole lot within the first three months of the financial year.” And then the graphic attached to the tweet said “The last Tory Government spent Britain’s reserve, money set aside for genuine emergencies, three times in three months.”
https://x.com/darrenpjones/status/1847321183026336247
Firstly, I find this confusing. It’s based on the idea that governments are like a business, as businesses have reserve accounts where they hold funds to cover emergencies. But then it also states this is the country’s overdraft – I’m not sure how something can be both an overdraft and at the same time be money set aside.
I’m also not sure how a government can spend the same money three times – surely this works against his point, as if you can spend the same money three times then that indicates that your account doesn’t actually contain money set aside but rather you aren’t limited in what you can spend and you can always spend more if you so choose.
If the reserve/overdraft account is only for emergencies, does this mean it is a separate account from the account the government uses for non-emergencies, and if so how many different accounts does the government have with the Bank of England?
In your talk with Faiza Shaheen you said when Rachel Reeves became an MP in 2010 you would sometimes talk to her, and you believe she genuinely believes what she is saying, that tax funds spending, government debt is bad and a burden on our grandchildren, and she can’t borrow too much because the markets will do the same thing to her as they did to Liz Truss.
(On a related note, there was a telling line in Andrew Rawnsley’s piece today: “Ms Reeves’s people are encouraging comparisons with significant “correction” budgets of the past, such as George Osborne’s austerity budget of 2010” – that they actually see being compared to Osborne as a good thing tells us everything.)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/20/rachel-reeves-wont-be-loved-for-a-tough-budget-her-best-hope-is-to-earn-respect
Based on your interactions with these people, how do the people in charge see the government’s accounts as working?
Do they believe all these things while still understanding that the way government spending works is that the government tells the Bank of England to make a payment and it then does so by moving the government’s account into overdraft?
Or do they believe, as Jones’ tweet suggests, that the government has an actual bank account that has money sitting in it waiting to be spent, and when they collect tax or sell bonds it goes into this account and builds up this positive balance of money?
You are bright to be confused: Darren Jones is deeply so, and clearly has not the slightest idea about how personal accounting or business accounting, let alone government accounting works.
I think he might believe what your last ara suggests: if so he is intenslely wrong.
I sense a video coming on.
May I suggest a vlog post? The role of The City to the nation, and how to contain or defeat it.
Noted
You both made some very important points here; the one that really struck me was about changing the narrative. The so-called “Black Hole” is most definitely, in reality, a ‘Worm Hole’ leading to a ‘Wealth Opulence Haven’! We should try to expose the ‘Wealth Benefit Slush Fund’ that is an honest representation of our current inequality perpetrating taxation system in the UK. The skyrocketing level of ‘Wealth Benefit Fraud’ in the UK is far greater than the pitance the most impoverished family carer might inadvertently claim. We must call this out and fully expose overpaid executives who have gamed the system to extract vital funding from our privatized public services like the water companies.
However, I also think that there is great value in pictorial images to get an important point across to the uninformed. One I saw demonstrating money creation, showed a Bath tub filling up with water from taps, indicative of Government input of cash; the plug hole drained excess water out of the tub – Taxes – to prevent overflow of water: inflation. It was very graphic and clearly illustrative.of how the economy works. It might then be possible to enlist the help of the group ‘Led By Donkeys’ to get this image onto public billboards.
There is a really cool computer program available that can be used to create the very effective ‘fast drawing’ videos, accompanied by an explanatory narrative. This might be worth investigating as a tool for getting your message across to an even larger audience. We really need to pull out all the stops in order to reverse the cruel public brainwashing, perpetrated by the wealthy elite to continue their extraction campaign as supported by both political parties. It is time to expose the Emperor’s New Clothes!
Hey Mr. Murphy,
I was so happy to see you together with Steve Keen. Your arguments were interesting and on-point again.
Please show up there more often 🙂
Have you ever had a show with Stephanie Kelton or one of the other reknown MMT people?
Cheers and keep up fighting for the good and better in your stile!
Ricco Lindner aka ProgressiveEconomicsSupporter or ProgressiveMastermind on YouTube
Germany
I have not done anything with Stephanie for a long time – although we did Kilkenomics together some time ago
I want to pick up on a point you made about the left needing to get better at politics and the dearth of good characters on the left to take up the cause.
I was talking to my friends about Danny Dyer and his most recent renaissance (he really is very good in Rivals). A friend asked if he was just a permanent character and of course he is. He studied under Harold Pinter, who wrote roles specifically for him and he very much knows what he is doing. All the best people at the top of the game are performing a character – but a friend of mine said Liz Truss wasn’t. I disagreed because she has always been performing a character – changing from an abolish the monarchy liberal at uni to impress her peers to a rabid neo-liberal monarchist for the Tories – it’s just that a) she’s not very good at it and b) she was appealing directly to a very small minority of Uber idiots who make up the majority of the Tory membership. And because her character isn’t based on some guiding principle of real identity underneath it falls apart under scrutiny and doesn’t make for good guidance of government. She doesn’t believe it either. Whereas Danny Dyer has built a hugely successful career on top of a blokey identity that is real – which also gives him the ability to go on national television and heroically call David Cameron a “tw*t”. It afforded him the luxury of saying what we all think and no one bats an eyelid. If you could get Danny Dyer to talk MMT in his way it would cut through a hell of a lot better.
All of this is to say that I think that what the left needs more than anything is powerful and compelling characters. Because the left is mostly made up of quite boring, earnest types. Sarcastic humorists. Activists. Lecturers. All wonderful people with the whiff of something a bit off-putting. They’re too easy to target. I personally really like you Richard, but you do have a certain smugness that comes from being right all the time. Like Stewart Lee’s carefully crafted character, it probably puts off as many people as it entertains. Whereas the right has no problem with utilising absolute clowns like Boris Johnson to entertain and swindle the masses.
I reckon that if there’s any budding young politicians on the left who want to scale the heights of politics and change the world that what they really need to do is take courses in Stanislavski and build some interesting characters out of their natural inclination for progressive justice.
I don’t think I’m right all the time
You just have to have some self confidence to survive the shit thrown at you in this game
Not many have it
Michael, charisma means a lot. Con artiists thrive on it. I have seen them in action victimizing people.
However Richard did direct us to the end of the video where he hit home with Keen and his guests on the need for a narrative!
The MMT narrative is a digital narrative, but it is complicated by the fact that the vast majority of money is created by the banks which few can understand. That has been known since 1931 when the UK MacMillan Committee said “It is not unnatural to think of the deposits of a bank as being created by the public through the deposit of cash representing either savings or amounts which are not for the time being required to meet expenditure. But the bulk of the deposits arise out of the action of the banks themselves, for by granting loans, allowing money to be drawn on an overdraft or purchasing securities a bank creates a credit in its books, which is the equivalent of a deposit.” That has never sunk in, even with many economists.
Given that people believe government creates the money, and that most money is cash sitting in a vault, I think the Franklin/Lincoln narratives which I listed in a reply above would work best. They are the simplest.
That is a very useful quotation
Thank you Joseph, I shall watch all of those!
And thank you too Richard – only some slight teasing for comic effect – I very much appreciate your confidence and fortitude with all of the shit!
Thanks
Well Richard, given that you have some of that charisma that Michael says a good narrator needs, I am sure you will make better use of it, than has happened in the last 93 years.
Though the influential Schumpeter was not listened to either:
“But this … makes it highly inadvisable to construe bank credit on the model of existing funds’ being withdrawn from previous uses by an entirely imaginary act of saving and then lent out by their owners. It is much more realistic to say that the banks … create deposits in their act of lending, than to say that they lend the deposits that have been entrusted to them. … The theory to which economists clung so tenaciously makes [depositors] out to be savers when they neither save nor intend to do so; it attributes to them an influence on the ‘supply of credit’ which they do not have. Nevertheless, it proved extraordinarily difficult for economists to recognize that bank loans and bank investments do create deposits. In fact, throughout the period under review they refused with practical unanimity to do so. And even in 1930, when a large majority had been converted and accepted that doctrine as a matter of course, Keynes rightly felt it to be necessary to re-expound and to defend the doctrine at length.”
Thanks
So, it’s Tuesday 22nd and I’ve finally made it to the end of the programme. AMAZING!
As a newly active member of the Green Party (I’ve been a silent paid up member for about 4 years) the aspect of this discussion that I’ve really taken on board is that of STORYTELLING.
The English (and I suspect it is the English rather than the whole UK) audience loves a cuddly bunny, even if that bunny has knives and machine guns under it’s fur. Look at our health and well being – no-one did the mass manipulation of the media better than the late Michael Moseley.
You want to talk about children’s stories look no further than dear Michael Rosen.
And money matters? It’s the Lewis’s – BBC Paul and ITV Martin.
Ministers will answer to them because they are afraid of their power of communication. They are implicitly trusted (rightly or wrongly).
What do you think? No-one else in the media has the popular following or (probably) the chutzpah to challenge the orthodoxy and get to the nub of why Reeves is so wrong, and the timing for MMT is so right.
All the indicators are there, we’re on the brink of climate collapse, public service collapse, infrastructure collapse, and the only castles in the sky are growth and wellbeing spurred on by climate mitigation, national renewal, banishing poverty and reaching out for world peace.
I won’t go on you know my thoughts on that!
So, the question is, how to get into the media?
That must be the next step – your Radio 2 background must e a stepping stone, the problem we have is time. It’s a complex education challenge getting journalists to start asking the relevant questions, challenging the status quo. If one or two pace setters (the Lewis’s) can get the ball rolling, simply getting the rock rolling, perhaps more will follow. But they all need briefing so that they can feel confidant in asking the main questions and then following up with confidence when it comes to the supplementaries.
Do what the Taxpayers Alliance do and have people ready to appear. I’m going to suggest this to the new MMT alliance (assuming I get asked at some point of course) and get the Patriotic Millionaires or some similar mob to fund the idea. Media might not take to the idea of course but filling space for them is always a challenge and if informed opinion is to hand hopefully they’ll accept it, ending the days when we just get the likes of Rupert Harrison alone on Sky giving his very one-sided opinion on current matters to an amiable Sophie Ridge. Good grief, given how badly the economy performed when he was an advisor to Osborne some would wonder why he was even asked…
The entire Sophie Ridge team, barring Jon Craig, follow me on Twitter and I have never been on. And Jon and I were co-editors of our university newspaper in 1977.
Richard I do not understand your criticism of positive money. In this little clip they seem to have the same agenda you do. And their monetary policy makes him a little bit more rebellious than you. 🙂
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/KPWZwy8cUsFfjuY8/
Their problem is they don’t understand money
I know no-one who understands money who thinks they believe in anything but an updated gold standard
They are utterly baffling
They have improved, but still there can be money without debt, and that is nonsense
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