Real Progressives had a great interview tonight, Guest Pavlina Tcherneva on Real Progressives: History of Income Inequality.

Paulina Tcherneva said that the manufacturing jobs won’t come back and we have to adjust to making service jobs good jobs. All of that is true, but it misses a very important point. The Modern Money Model shows that there is no dollar constraint on our economy. The real constraint is the ability of the economy to produce the goods needed that can be bought with the dollar.

With automation and robots, the jobs won’t come back, but the productive capacity could come back if the factories (with few workers} were located in this country and were subject to US laws and regulations.

There are many fewer people doing farming these days than there were in the early 1900s, yet we produce far more food. In the future, there will be many fewer people working in factories, but we will be producing much more manufactured goods unless we move all of our factories to foreign countries.

For us to take advantage of the policy freedoms that our sovereign money gives us, we have to have the productive capacity of our economy to allow us to enjoy the lifestyle we all want.

New Economic Perspectives has the May 17, 2012 article Playing Monopolis Monopoly: An inquiry into why we are making ourselves so miserable. Don’t let the word Monopolis throw you. This is just mostly regular Monopoly.

If you have ever played or think you can learn to play the children’s board game of Monopoly, then you can understand this explanation of Modern Money Theory.

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the inventors of this game had in mind exactly this goal of teaching. (So look this idea up on Google and find the WikiPedia article History of the board game Monopoly.)