YouTube has the video Argentina’s Job Guarantee-Like Program.

Professor Pavlina Tcherneva discusses Argentina’s Jefes program, which was similar to the Job Guarantee advocated by proponents of Modern Money Theory.

I had no idea that there was all this research and practical experience behind the idea of a Job Guarantee. After I look at some more of this, I may have to change my mind about how practical it is. This is from 2016.

Here is a playlist of videos on the Jobs Guarantee.

I am wondering if the DNC has rigged the presidential primaries already. What has me wondering is Rule 2.A.1.

Rule 2
Participation

1. Participation in the delegate selection process shall be open to all voters who wish to participate as Democrats.
   1. Democratic voters shall be those persons who publicly declare their Party preference and have that preference publicly recorded.

In the 2018 primaries in Massachusetts, I took out a Democratic Primary ballot as an unenrolled voter. That means I was not enrolled in any party.

Unlike many years ago, this did not change my party enrollment from unenrolled to Democrat. Long ago, Massachusetts primary voters had to change their party enrollment back to unenrolled. You could do that before even leaving the polling station.

I wonder how the Massachusetts procedure may have to be changed to meet the new DNC rules.

Given that the general election includes unenrolled voters, I wonder why the DNC wants to choose its candidates without any input from unenrolled voters. As in 2016, this choice proved to be disastrous. Over the country, the Democrats chose a candidate that the Democrats liked, but the rest of the voters did not like. Is the Democratic Party wanting to repeat the 2016 debacle?

Naked Capitalism has the article Bill Black: Tom Friedman Just Noticed that the UK “Has Gone Mad”.

MMT [Modern Money Theory] is not simply an Ivory Tower theory. Finance professionals use it because it produces superior predictive results. If politicians like Blair, Brown, and Obama had studied MMT, they would have avoided many of their worst economic blunders that brought us Brexit and Trump.

As I was reading this article, I suddenly realized the problem with voting for the lesser of two evils. When you “win”, people tend to forget that they won with an evil candidate. After you “win”, you must oppose the evil that you voted for.

In this article Bill Black describes the evil that was done by our choice of winners.

New Economic Perspectives has the article MMT, Models, Multidisciplinarity.

The upshot is that, there is an inverse relationship between the price the government pays for goods and services and the quantity of real goods and services it receives, for a given level of taxation and net saving desires. Constraining the budget creates unemployment and under-provisions the government. If instead, the government allowed its budget to float, if could design a countercyclical policy (such as the Job Guarantee) that would be a superior price anchor and automatic stabilizer, which I modeled in a subsequent paper. So unlike basic neoclassical PPF models that pass objectionable tradeoffs as efficient, the Job Guarantee explicitly rejects the use of unemployment for economic stabilization purposes.

There is a lot in this article that is worth learning. It will take further reading and thought to digest it all. The references in the article will be interesting to follow.

There is one comment in the article, that I have said myself.

Now, all models make simplifications and all models are flawed. But they can be used to clarify an idea.

On this blog, I found one post I wrote that expresses the same sentiment. The post is Financial Modelers’ Manifesto posted on December 2, 2010.

I believe in this oath even for my former line of work modeling the behavior of integrated circuits. In my line of work, I was actually modeling laws of physics, but all models simplify.

The Real News Network has a two episode piece What is a “Guaidó”?.

Former Catholic Priest and Wyoming native Charlie Hardy talks about his recent experiences in Venezuela and looks back on 25 years living among the poorest of Venezuela’s poor.

Here are the two videos.

What is a “Guaidó”? A Cowboy in Caracas (Pt 1/2).

What is a “Guaidó”? A Cowboy in Caracas (Pt 2/2).

Watch these two episodes, and then tell me why Bernie Sanders would object to our oligarchs’ news media being called “the enemy of the people”.

RT has the article German ‘rent insanity’ sparks mass tenant protests, expropriation action.

Germans in large cities are protesting on Saturday against what they see as the unfair influence of large landlords on the housing market. They want the biggest players undercut and their property expropriated.

Is this a movement coming to a country where you may be living? Sometimes people have a limit to the exploitation they are willing to put up with. It is not wise for the exploiters to push past that point.

In the USA, real-estate prices are essentially set by what the banks are willing to finance. The more money you need to borrow to buy your real-estate, the more interest the banks make. With rising real-estate prices, the real-estate you pledged to get the original loan rises in value to protect the bank’s investment in the mortgage. So the problem is not only with the big owners of real-estate.

The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies posted a transcript of the introduction and a link to the Bloomberg episode This Is How MMT Applies To Emerging Markets (Podcast).

“In discussions about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) you often hear that while it may be true that the U.S. has the space to expand its deficits significantly, that it doesn’t apply to emerging markets. On this week’s episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we speak to Fadhel Kaboub, a professor of economics at Denison University, who examines emerging markets through the MMT lens. While it’s true that emerging markets don’t have the same kind of fiscal capacity as nations like the U.S., Canada, and Australia, the theory still offers insights into how EMs can pursue development policies that are different from the mainstream prescriptions”…..and the U.K.

Excellent podcast. As a follower of MMT, I learned how to apply it to emerging markets in ways I would never have figured out for myself. In some ways it is frustrating to hear these interviews conducted by people who do not understand MMT. However, the only way for MMT to progress is for the experts to explain it to the non-experts, which was done in an excellent fashion in this podcast. If you are not an MMT expert, then this podcast may be just what you need.

Cornerstone On Demand has the post Ted Talk Tuesday: Rewards Aren’t the Key to Employee Motivation.

In his TED Talk, “The Puzzle of Motivation,” Pink explores what motivates people and how company leaders can apply this research to their own organizations. He goes on to explain what social scientists know, but most managers don’t: Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think.

There is a lot of truth here, but don’t get carried away by a good sales pitch.

Some detail about the subject of motivation can be gleaned from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, coincidentally from WikiPedia.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” in Psychological Review.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, represented as a pyramid with the more basic needs at the bottom

Companies I worked for had the practice of periodically announcing special rewards for exceptional achievement. I don’t know how much of an incentive this presented to the winners of the award, but I frequently observed what a disincentive it was to all those people who thought they had done great work, but did not receive any special award or acclaim. To the “self-actualized” people, the lack of a reward was only a temporary disappointment.

I was led to this video by a comment on the post A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you in Naked Capitalism.

Meritocracy has become a leading social ideal. Politicians across the ideological spectrum continually return to the theme that the rewards of life – money, power, jobs, university admission – should be distributed according to skill and effort. The most common metaphor is the ‘even playing field’ upon which players can rise to the position that fits their merit. Conceptually and morally, meritocracy is presented as the opposite of systems such as hereditary aristocracy, in which one’s social position is determined by the lottery of birth. Under meritocracy, wealth and advantage are merit’s rightful compensation, not the fortuitous windfall of external events.

Here, again, is an article with some merit, but be very careful that you don’t get carried away with the ideas in the article.

RT (formerly known as Russia Today ) has the video Money supply drives rally (E1366).

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max and Stacy discuss the money supply increasing at the same pace as the S&P 500 stock market rally. Could they have anything to do with each other? Hmmmm. We wonder. They also discuss the rapidly increasing rents causing voters to demand action from candidates when, perhaps, the only problem is the central banks printing money for their member banks.

In the second half, Max interviews Steve Beauregard of Bloq about building in a bitcoin bear market.

It is amazing how these people can be so wrong about so much, but introduce an idea or two that is correct.

They did not exactly say this, but what they said about asset price inflation including real estate and rents made me realize why rent-control is a bad idea. Real estate price increases and rent price increases are the consequence of the massive money creation that is going on that is not producing “consumer” price inflation. As some proponent of Modern Money Theory (MMT) has pointed out, real estate prices are driven by how much money banks will lend for real estate. With all that central bank money that has been created with nothing to invest that money in except some assets and stock prices, this is what is driving up real-estate and rents.

The rent price control that might work would be to stop putting the money directly in the private banks, but for the government to spend this money into the economy in ways which increased the size of the real economy to produce economically useful stuff for the consumers. By buying stuff and employing people to make it, the money would be recirculated into the economy to buy the new stuff the growing economy could produce. Let’s also not forget that tax policy can also be used to redirect private sector money away from harmful uses. The taxes that the government collects can then be redirected to productive uses.

One of the issues that the current discussion of Modern Money Theory lacks is a discussion of the economic impacts of the distribution of money within a sector. MMT gains a lot of insights from looking at the sector balances between the government sector, the domestic private sector, and the foreign sector. As important as the flows between the sectors is, the flow of money within a sector is important too.

If you need for me to try to untangle the last few sentences I have written, ask questions on Facebook so I will know what needs to be untangled.

The Real News Network has the episode Economic Update: Beyond Universal Basic Income.

On this week’s show Prof. Wolff presents an in-depth analysis of UBI shows its advantages over most welfare, safety net systems. An even better alternative would avoid capitalism’s unnecessary production of unemployment because it utilizes technical progress (rising productivity) for profits. The alternative benefits workers’ leisure rather than profits. It is more democratic and avoids splitting people into unemployed vs employed, non-poor vs poor population.

Wow! This may be the most important video you see this year. Sure, there are things to discuss about this, but first absorb the concepts, and then we can talk about the details.

I’ll copy a couple of questions and answers that I got into on The Real News Network.

JoAnn : It’s, certainly, a good idea, but, getting US corporations to forgo that extra profit would be difficult.

Me : Once you get the concepts, this is one of the issues to discuss. Suppose you were given the task of getting corporations to go along with the basic idea. What things could you conjure up to solve the problem? Maybe some of the benefits of productivity could accrue to the corporations, but just not all of the benefits.

goedelite : “On this week’s show Prof. Wolff presents an in-depth analysis of UBI shows its advantages over most welfare, safety net system” opens the article. Do you find such linguistic garbage an invitation or a discouragement? I read no further.

Me : I think this is one description of a closed mind. If you could stand to listen, you might actually be exposed to good ideas you have never had.