kontrast.at has the article Portugal has found an antidote to right wing populism.

Considering the booming economy, dropping unemployment numbers and the return of many once-emigrated young Portuguese citizens, it seems Portugal is on the rise. Facing the policies of socialist Prime Minister António Costa, which include properly supporting the welfare state and investing in the public sector instead of austerity measures, right wing populists don’t stand a chance.

This is from February 2019. This appears to be an example that shows that getting away from the austerity of neoliberalism can make significant improvements in the lifestyles of the people in countries that can use some socialism where appropriate.

The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies has published an article on the interview Modern Monetary Theory: meet the economists fighting the economy.

From the USA presidential campaign perspective, I choose to highlight the following excerpt:

The jobs guarantee has the crucial advantage over universal basic income that it encourages the employment of people to do work that needs doing, and there’s no shortage of that.

“There are a whole set of activities that address unmet community need that the market will never address because they can’t be reconstructed into profit-making activities,” Mitchell argues.

YouTube has the video The Good Dream is Factual MMT Warren Mosler.

First International Conference on Modern Monetary Theory 2017

An excellent address by Warren Mosler

This is one fabulous video. Warren Mosler always can simplify concepts so that they are hard to argue against. The only problem is that most people will have a little voice in their heads telling them that what Mosler says can’t possibly be true. Every reason people can come up with about why it can’t be true is easily shot down. Yes, but what about this, or what about that? Mosler has an answer for all of these things.

I like to use the Mark Twain quote – “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” People just know for sure that what Mosler says just cannot be true.

Here is a transcript of one quote in particular that is worth my remembering.

The government needs you to need their money. 33:45 “I don’t like to say taxes don’t fund spending because the word fund is ambiguous and even though you are right you can be dead right. It’s better to say the government doesn’t need your money to be able to spend. Not that it doesn’t fund it, it’s they don’t need it to be able to spend, but they need you not to have it. … You have to create a shortage to be able to spend. Taxes are more powerful than spending. A tax of $1 allows the government to spend maybe $1.25.”

YouTube has the video Shoshana Zuboff: Surveillance capitalism and democracy.

The collection and analysis of data is changing the way economies operate. Are these changes so fundamental that they can be said to have led to the emergence of a new form of capitalism – surveillance capitalism? If people’s behaviour is made increasingly transparent, do we become a society in which trust is no longer necessary? Are individuals a mere appendage to the digital machine, objects of new mechanisms which reward and punish according to the determinations of private capital? How is social cohesion affected when people become dispensable as a labour force, while their data continues to provide function as a source of value in lucrative new markets that trade in predictions of human behaviour? How should we understand the new quality of power that arises from these unprecedented conditions? What kind of society does it aim to create? And what ramifications will these developments have for the principles of liberal democracy? Will privacy law and anti-trust law be enough? How can we tame what we do not yet understand?

I had no idea how eyeopening this talk would be. It was worth every minute of the 2 hours I spent watching this. Some of her most profound statements came in the Q & A session after the formal talk. I’ll have to go back and listen to the introductions. I initially skipped over them because I was impatient to hear about this topic that was new to me.