YouTube has the video Discussing MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) with Warren Mosler.
Discussing MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) with Warren Mosler
Warren Mosler might have explained that money created by private banks has been tried many times throughout history, but most times such monetary systems were subject to panics and crashes. That’s ostensibly why the Federal Reserve Bank system was created. Why didn’t Warren understand where the interviewer was coming from so that he could adjust his explanation to the capabilities of the interviewer? I could only stand to watch about 50 minutes of this. Maybe, in the next hour that I didn’t see it all worked out.
This is the comment I left for Warren Mosler.
Sorry to say this, but in the 49 minutes of this that I watched, it seems like you kept going around in circles. You kept sticking to your fundamental, but you weren’t successfully communicating with this guy. It’s a fun exercise if you like that sort of thing, but after enough experiences with this type of argument, wouldn’t you start to suspect that there must be a better way to go at this? Have you ever watched Fadhel Kaboub? He seems to make progress explaining these things to people that you don’t seem able to achieve.
Is there some point to discussing MMT beyond just being right? Tell me where in this two hour video I should look to see where you finally got through to this guy. If you continually fail to get through to large numbers of people, maybe the blame doesn’t fall solely on the listener. Maybe the speaker has to learn how to adapt to the way people learn.
Your teaching methods worked for me, because I have learned to understand MMT pretty well. However, the vast majority of the people haven’t go it yet. Some of the people who have got it learned from Stephanie Kelton and Fadhel Kaboub. I am also a big fan of Michael Hudson’s, but it has taken me several years to finally understand him.
It was either Bill Keane or William Mitchel who mentioned the high level of debt that was a problem in China. I thought that was an odd thing for an MMT proponent to say. It took me a few years to realize thew debt he was worried about was private sector debt, not government debt of a country that had a sovereign currency. Maybe it was listening to Michael Hudson over and over again that finally made me see the light.
I love good explanations that straighten out my understanding of reality, but I also appreciate good teaching methods that more people can use to understand the explanation.
Where I went to college we often talked about lessons where the professor would apocryphally say that “this is obvious to the most casual observer”. However, that was an ironic joke on how some professors taught. To many very smart students it was not obvious at all. We spent many hours trying not to be the most casual observer, and we still had troubles some times.
As a matter of fact, I have great difficulty explaining this problem to some leading proponents of MMT. I keep plugging away trying different methods of explaining, but so far I don’t seem to find the way to explain it. I wish Fadhel Kaboub would teach me how to explain it the way he does.
I have two previous posts that demonstrate how Fadhel Kaboub explains things. See MMT Insights on Different Amounts of Currency Sovereignty and African Monetary Sovereignty