Columbia today, home Wed
Posted by WARREN MOSLER on September 25th, 2012
The Center of the Universe
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MOSLER'S LAW: There is no financial crisis so deep that a sufficiently large tax cut or spending increase cannot deal with it.-
MMT: Taxes function to regulate aggregate demand, and not to raise revenue per se.
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September 25th, 2012 at 10:17 am
Break a leg! Looking forward your”s and Stephanie’s presentation.
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September 25th, 2012 at 7:19 pm
Will the video be published later? I missed the first hour. :-(
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September 26th, 2012 at 1:20 am
Columbia today, the world tomorrow!!!!
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Yuu Kim Reply:
September 27th, 2012 at 11:58 am
@Mario,
columbia today, the world tomorrow, then congress day after tomorrow!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15VtwwHdKDI
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September 26th, 2012 at 1:50 am
Why is Stephanie only an “Associate Professor of Economics”? She should be a full blown professor. As for Warren, he should get Nobel Prize. He’s done far more than some of the time wasters in academia who have been given a Nobel Prize.
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September 26th, 2012 at 1:50 am
I watched the first session with Wray and Hudson. I really enjoyed what they had to say about the history of money, but Hudson’s history and politics are really… interesting. It seems to be conspiracy theorizing of the highest order, calling for brilliant US government agents and idiotic foreign players as needed to further the argument. I suspect that the Chinese may feel slightly surprised to know that the US government has pushed them into their export led growth model to further its own military adventurism. Frankly speaking if the wise men in charge of US policy were this brilliant, then I suspect the country would look much better today. There are far more benign answers to all the questions he raises.
I don’t mean to get into the politics because that’s not my point here. But this comes back to the trouble that MMT has getting traction. There’s a strong progressive streak within MMT, which is a good thing, but expanding the definition of the public interest and advocating policies to further it is one thing, while this is quite another. I’m convinced by MMT (or at least as convinced as my confidence in my understanding of MMT allows me to be), but I was really turned off by the heavy dose of left politics surrounding the argument.
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WARREN MOSLER Reply:
September 26th, 2012 at 7:20 pm
yes
and you mean ‘some mmt proponents’ rather than mmt per se.
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Jose Guilherme Reply:
September 26th, 2012 at 9:28 pm
@Karl,
“Frankly speaking if the wise men in charge of US policy were this brilliant, then I suspect the country would look much better today”.
If you try substituting “the elite” for “the country” then maybe Michael Hudson will start making sense to you ?
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y Reply:
September 27th, 2012 at 5:21 am
I like Hudson’s rants. You don’t have to agree with what everyone says. People are entitled to their political views.
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September 26th, 2012 at 2:33 pm
Warren, thank you and Stephanie for the talk. It was elucidating, and I could see some of attendees long held dogmas being challenged by the elegant simplicity of mmt. All the same I felt you were far too charitable with a few questioners. Notably a young man who proposed that, outside of sociopaths, there are those whose contribution to economic productivity could be net negatives. He tried to prove it with the tautoligical notion that if you are unemployed you must be a net negative, otherwise youd be employed. Like I said, you were too fair to him. Thank you again for the time yesterday.
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WARREN MOSLER Reply:
September 26th, 2012 at 7:18 pm
right, thanks! I recall suggesting he must be talking of an employee who walks around breaking things, and agreed he’d need to be let go.
Doesn’t take a lot of talent to hold hands at old age homes, which is certainly more value added than too many of today’s financial sector jobs that don’t have to exist, when productivity is high enough for there to be plenty of food, clothing, and shelter, and workers to spare.
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Neil Wilson Reply:
September 27th, 2012 at 3:17 am
@WARREN MOSLER,
” when productivity is high enough for there to be plenty of food, clothing, and shelter, and workers to spare.”
Thus generating the paradox of productivity that has to be actively resolved by policy.
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WARREN MOSLER Reply:
September 27th, 2012 at 10:36 pm
why is it a paradox?
roger erickson Reply:
September 28th, 2012 at 4:39 pm
@Warren Mosler,
Right. It’s not a paradox, it’s constant opportunities.
Without extra resources, we can’t evolve. Been that way for at least 3.5 Billion years on planet earth.
Reserve drives diversity drives selection drives evolution.
Embrace the path. Explore your expanding options.
John Horkin Reply:
September 29th, 2012 at 11:12 am
@Neil Wilson, Roger Erickson, you keep talking about return on coordination, like that is the ultimate engineering nirvana, a couple posts were made to you about your hypocrisy on cutting people’s return on coordination if they couldn’t get reputation or acknowledgement, and you didn’t answer, and I am going to pester you til the ends of the universe about this topic. I want some feedback you hypocrite! Lets do some returning on coordinating right here right now!
Why is return on coordination only acceptable if we kill “anonymous”? I thought you were more enlightened than that, pathetic. As a kid I watched a lot of lone ranger and zorro movies, you are the evil scumbag who wants to unmask them, you are a fraud when it comes to return on coordination, you only want it under certain “controlled” conditions, in the biological systems I work in, you are a biologial dead end. You are not dynamic or adaptive enough, and when you encounter something you don’t like or can’t control, JUST LIKE all these kleptocrats you criticize, your initial kneejerk reaction is to cut it off and destroy it, there is no REAL return on coordination with you, you only want that in a land of identity, like the organism CARES which t-cell kills the cancer, but you want special recognition for being the t-cell that dealt the fatal last blow, huh? You are nutz and ignorant to your own ideals. Answer me, why do the people who USE anonymous twitter accounts stop doing GOOD WORK with narcotweets if they can’t get reputation for the ideas? Why do you practice the same destruction of return on coordination? I have never heard a doctor say, wow, this cell is the one that killed off that last cancer cell, we are going to give that cell a medal, special recognition. Why are you monkeys SO ATTACHED to identity, recognition, acknowledgement, it is a dark path to hell from my perspective Mr. Return on Coordination – LOL! When you are willing to throw your identity into the trashbin of history, and become a REAL BORG, then I will believe you are not a hypocrite and really about some returning on coordinating. Your weak emoational need for identity is holding us back, you are the problem Erickson, ascend.
Clonal Antibody Reply:
September 28th, 2012 at 9:39 am
@WARREN MOSLER,
Warren,
On the Indian rural job guarantee, the questioner was incorrect on his evaluation of the Indian Act – namely “It did not work.” All the published research on the Act’s impact show that it worked in spite of there being many issues involved in its implementation. the Ministry of Rural Development has just put out an anthology of all the research studies done on the impacts of the Act.
See “MGNREGA Sameeksha 2012″: An anthology of research studies on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (2006–2012) – A report by the Ministry of Rural Development
It is a must read for all those interested in looking objectively at the “Job Guarantee”
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September 27th, 2012 at 10:15 am
I watched the presentation while getting my hair cut — my barber had a computer. I then replayed the Wray-Hudson presention. She was utterly aghast at the implications. Why, she asked, why are the government and some many economists lying to us? This is very depressing she said. It means all our sacrifices have been for nothing.
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roger erickson Reply:
September 27th, 2012 at 1:46 pm
@Thomas Bergbusch,
Then break it to her gently that she, her parents and even her grandparents never needed to pay FICA taxes at all.
It’s true. Most sacrifices ARE for nothing. Everything we do – or don’t do – is subject to a selection market.
All that matters from here is how carefully we select to actually do.
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September 27th, 2012 at 11:24 am
Thank´s Warren! Found this nice piece: “Keynes and Modern Monetary Theory-Lars Pålsson Syll professor at Malmö University”
http://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2012/09/27/keynes-and-modern-monetary-theory/
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September 27th, 2012 at 2:09 pm
Hudson is at his best when explaining that classical economics targeted rentier income and when explaining the increasing financialization of the economy–although Warren does this far more concisely and without the high temperature.
However, Hudson is frequently out of paradigm, and some have even gone so far as to say that this is deliberate on his part and is in the service of his rhetorical efficacy. I say that is nonsense. He simply is not consequential. Hudson is a Marxist. His politics and even his interpretations of history are broadly Marxist. This determines his intellectual orientation and distorts his explanations in favor of a kind of ideological override.
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Yuu Kim Reply:
September 27th, 2012 at 3:15 pm
@Jim,
i don’t think the 2 opposing viewpoints you give (“deliberately out-of-paradigm” vs. “marxist”) are necessarily mutually exclusive.
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September 27th, 2012 at 4:12 pm
They do when political rhetoric trumps the paradigm–which was my point, otherwise I would have said that he is a Marxist and therefore always out of paradigm. Marx, inasmuch as he was a classical economist is one thing, Marxism swallowed whole is quite another.
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September 27th, 2012 at 4:13 pm
Also, I did not say “deliberately out of paradigm,” I said “frequently out of paradigm.”
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September 27th, 2012 at 4:15 pm
I said “some have even gone so far as to say that this is deliberate on his part…,” and I clearly removed myself from opinion.
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Yuu Kim Reply:
September 27th, 2012 at 6:10 pm
@Jim,
yes, i know. i took “poetic license” with the quotes, cuz, though you were careful to mention the 2 separately (and separate yourself from the 2nd opinion), i personally believe he IS deliberately out-of-paradigm.
my belief is that he came to MMT late in the game and now he has a quandary–he can publically come around to MMT and contradict a lot of what he has said for the past 40-some-odd years or he can do what he’s doing now, that being, straddle the fence and rub shoulders with the MMT crowd on the one hand, yet still put forth the notion that Marx was some great wise man and promote himself as an expert on Marx and, thereby, maintain his academic “relevance.”
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September 27th, 2012 at 7:31 pm
You may well be right, at least to some extent, and it is plausible. I just wanted to keep to what was observable.
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September 30th, 2012 at 7:39 pm
http://cnsnews.com/video/washington/hillary-loosen-regulation-because-too-many-people-still-can-t-find-jobs-tunisia
Hillary clinton saying they are gonna spend lotta money to give unemployed in Tunisia a job, why can’t she also say this about USA unemployed? I don’t phugging get it? How do we have money for Tunisia, but not money for USA? WE ARE FREAKING DOOMED!
I just got told I can’t be seen by US NAVY Medical doctor, but on the front of Navy Compass magazine, they have Navy Hospital Ship going to third world country giving people lotsa medicine, how come I can’t get medicine, but we can afford to send NAVY hospital ship overseas? Why do we take care of foreign nations better than our own people, phug this government.
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October 6th, 2012 at 8:11 pm
Warren,
When is the video going to be posted? It keeps saying coming soon.
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WARREN MOSLER Reply:
October 8th, 2012 at 7:54 pm
thought it was up? Or just the first one, which I seem to remember hearing was up?
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Adam1 Reply:
October 9th, 2012 at 7:58 am
@WARREN MOSLER,
The first one is the only one with a video. The others still just say coming soon.
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WARREN MOSLER Reply:
October 9th, 2012 at 9:56 pm
ok, don’t know