The Personal Public MMT Problem

Finding rare but perhaps not-so-rare minds

Whoahooh! Another free Ōhanga Pai not hidden on the github… and not about theoretical physics. It’s your lucky day.

I cannot recall ever convincing anyone to change their mind, unless they already deep down knew their viewpoints were suss and just needed some excuse to change views. The latter has happened a few times. I think the converse also holds. I wanted spacetime to be real… ooops! physics leakage… and I wanted neoliberalism to be objectively and axiomatically screwed up and horrible and to have manifold decent alternatives. Which it does.

If you disagree about anything on Ōhanga Pai and want to change my mind, I will pay attention, but give me some credit for having thought about macroeconomics an awful lot. Is it really you who would do better with your mind altered? (Apologies for deigning to even suggest that!)

The Normie Drugs

All the mainstream (including post-Keynesian and Marxist) economists are the ones on LSD. To alter your mind to a healthy state you have to get off that stuff. Sometimes it only needs a very small tweak like realizing we are no longer on a fixed exchange rate (Aotearoa here). But you have to have a little nous to join the dots to draw the doodles that outline policy space implications. Policy spacetime too! Dynamics cannot be ignored…. or you’ll fudging and up stupid brained.

Keynes had the General Theory but it was incomplete, it lacked the covariant derivatives of MMT. 😉

But my topic today is how to change the body politic mind? How to change the minds of the politicians and the policy makers and analysts. Let me first say, to avoid charges of arrogance, I do not frickin’ care how they change their minds! I would trust most people (the vast majority) learning MMT can easily come to the appropriate wise and morally decent policy options that were hitherto closed to them. Hey 1Dime and Studebaker! The way is not shut! You hear?! But you wouldn’t know because you are stuck in your own materialist paradigm box.

My eldest brother and sister work in the public sector in policy, and they were open to MMT, but they were among the rare (are they rare though?) in the category of those who knew mainstream econ was highly suss. Why? It is because they were not too well educated in economics (LOL), and more importantly they have always approached life from a spiritual point of view — meaning just simply with kindness, compassion, love, justice, wisdom, honesty, humilty —these all go first for my sister and brothers, before the mathematics! The mathematics is not unimportant, it can buttress honesty and wisdom, if the input is good. But GIGO folks… you have to have good inputs.

Yeah… they are not rare, or so I the omniscient dirtbag say!

The Antidotes?

I suck at community organization, but you may not! So do that! What I am ok with skill-wise is education. But I find MMT education very hard, because to be a good educator you really need to find students wanting to learn. So that puts me back at the start — finding people who deep down would be cool with having their worldview changed a little.

However, I would not be unhappy when I die if I only knew I had helped confirm the wisdom and compassion of a few people who already wanted to know how macroeconomic justice can work, and who wanted to know the full policy space available to their government.