Modern Monetary Theory

[dada]

Your reply actually shows a misunderstanding of the intuitive method, as you put it. I called it apprenticeship-style, hands on for the mechanically inclined. But whatever.

It's true, even the most liberal curriculum has basic requirements. I passed mine with flying colors.

And yes, what you're saying is distraction, is exactly what I'm doing. You're just seeing that as a bad thing. It really is a question of time as money. What will I spend it on this semester. I'm on a tight budget, don't forget.

[dada]

But yes, I was leaving the topic, and I still will, I guess when this thought-exchange is wrapped at the closing bell. And stop being distracting. It is a course, and I am not helping the students get good grades with my spider-man interruptions, I know. Hanging upside down from the ceiling, acting the fool.

Also, I like how you explains it, more ring of truth than circle of magic. I still won't take the course, but I respect your decision, and will stop calling proponents of the mmt fans, and recognize it as a "legitimate field of study," if it helps.

Jack: His lightning rod, for example, worked, independently of his having held slave auctions at his printing offices.)

I would argue it did not work independently of the slave auctions. The thoughts Franklin thought were made possible by the conditions he was in. We thinkers, who have the luxury to really think the big thoughts, pull more from the grid than anything else in the world. Me and you right here, in our poverty, are building our greatesf mental constructs on the steady bed of slavery, sweatshops, mass production.

edited to add: Music from the sweatshops of mass production. We're composing symphonies, like the composers of the most famous and popular, the ones that emotionally move mass culture to tears of pain and joy. They were not possible without the murderously oppressive class system that they composed in, providing them with paper and quill, harpsichord and quiet space.

[DrEvil]

First it was "Bitcoin can't be money because nobody uses it"

Still true (not counting ransomware and laundering). Buying it just so you can sit on it until you deem the returns good enough isn't "using it".

Then it was "Bitcoin can't be money because it's too volatile"

Still true. The value of one Bitcoin has dropped by almost half in one month. No one in their right mind would use that as a currency.

Then it was "Bitcoin can't be money because businesses won't accept it"

Still true. How often do you buy groceries and pay with Bitcoin?

Then it was "Bitcoin can't be money because governments don't accept it"

Still true. All governments except one don't accept it. More governments might accept it in the future, but if they do it will become just another currency, regulated and controlled and tracked, the exact thing Bitcoin is supposed to not be. The only practical difference will be the prefix on the numbers being subtracted from your account.

More likely they will outlaw Bitcoin and replace it with their own digital currencies, like China is in the process of doing.

What won't happen is that Bitcoin in its current form will somehow come out on top and we all sail off into a libertarian sunset.

[dada]

Just to go on for a second on the difference between apprentice style and classroom style learning, since it came up here, and I don't know where else to put it.

Apprentice works under a master, and when they become a master, the next apprentice works under them. The student is always taught the craft by the latest master, the one who was most recently a student.

So when the student apprentice is "initiated into the mysteries" of the particular craft, if they find that they can adequately extract wealth from labor which they put into study, they can continue to study the mysteries of the craft in the classroom setting. Books and exams, lectures and library searches.

The classroom style begins with master teaching students, the students are then "students of a school," and when they graduate the class, they don't become masters, but are still students of the school.

I know it's clear which style I prefer, I can't help that, my school spirit showing. Go wizards. But really it's just two different approaches to learning.

[dada]

Polishing the thought, and finishing it off, hopefully. On the master-apprentice relationship. The relationship is ongoing, not in the meaning that the master always has something to teach their former apprentice, they can now sit around drinking tea and talking about the hobbies that they love. But in the meaning of an apprentice that becomes masterful, or shows mastery of the craft, cannot be a master until they take on an apprentice or two.

Or more. But when out of the new apprentices of the newest master, one shows mastery of the craft, they don't become "master-apprentice," in between the master and apprentices, the relationship has not changed. To be a next master, free and accepted by the craft, they need to get them some apprentices of their own.

[dada]

I admit the topic gets me in the mood to wax poetic. Call it the romance of finance, I guess.

So maybe Franklin points us in the direction I'm getting at here. Not the electricity, but his craft, printing and publishing. Nowadays, thanks to electricity writers can print and publish all by themselves with great ease. I'm doing it right now. Not mass publishing, that's not possible for the writer to do on their own, yet.

The writer is welcome to pick up their bow and shoot arrows at the clouds, hoping to poke holes in them and open up the sky. The rain won't absolve the sins of mass production, or even slow it down. Doesn't stop heroes from trying, of course. If you feel you must, I recommend these dry ice arrows. Takes some time to seed, but is more likely to work. Also looks cool with the steam trails off the arrows.

But the real task of the writer is same as always, finding the right words to stir souls, show them that the war on suffering has not yet ended, not inviting them but compelling through the magic of the true craft of writing, to cry at the horror of the picture presented.

Or at the knockout beauty, which puts the horror of the world around it in crystal clear focus, seen through it, and surrounding it. The horror of the condition, that such a beautiful creature lives in this murderous insane asylum, is literally felt as pain, and should bring the tears.

The tears by which the true writer's craft is measured. Hopefully the writer gets across to the reader the general idea, that nothing can stop the mass production. Because only when the readers know it with all their heart can anything resembling real work begin. So the call isn't to train your arrows away from the clouds and aim them at the temples of mass production. The workers are in there, you might hurt someone. End up putting all the sufferers out of their misery by mistake, and not at all mercifully. The call is still, as always, to shoot your arrows into the heart of the consumer.

[JackRiddler]

Jack: His lightning rod, for example, worked, independently of his having held slave auctions at his printing offices.)

I would argue it did not work independently of the slave auctions. The thoughts Franklin thought were made possible by the conditions he was in.

This is obviously true. It is also not what I said.

You are saying, to paraphrase, 'he came up with his ideas while also being someone who held slave auctions at his printing offices' (editor: for advertisers who were auctioning slaves), without which we cannot know if he would have come up with his ideas'. If so, correct.

Cue famous and fitting quotation:

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

What I said was, the pointed lightning rod Franklin came up with and first tested in Britain worked better than the one devised by his scientific competitor. He may well have never had the idea without also having been the sort of man who had also held slave auctions, but still, once devised, the rod worked better than other designs, independently of the context within which the design had been conceived.

Similarly, the paper money idea Franklin advocated for (and advocated for as a self-interested party, no less, as he later got contracts to print colonial money) showed a better scientific-objective understanding of how states and money work, subsequently proven in practice, than did the ideas of those who would have dismissed paper money as a recipe for rapid destruction.

. tangent follows .

Do you know the lightning rod story, by the way? I did not until recently, so it's on my mind. Franklin, during the years he served as the representative of several colonial legislatures in Britain -- he was dissed as a colonial rube by the nobility and native gentry, to his proud 'self-made' criolo annoyance, which would prove fateful -- also consorted with and made presentations before the men of the royal academy of sciences, and got involved with a long debate on lightning and the proper design for a lightning rod. His design was pointy at the end, the competiting design blunt. According to our experimentally verified physics, nowadays proven several times a minute in places around the planet, Franklin was right. His lightning rod was better for catching and channeling lightning strikes to the ground.

His design was installed around the kingdom. Nevertheless there were lightning strikes at an armory and another sensitive facility in London, causing fire and damage, and an even greater scare, since the armory could have exploded and taken half the city with it. By then Franklin had left to report to the Continental Congress, and George III was convinced he had committed sabotage by lightning rod, and ordered the removal of Franklin's lightning rods. The king and others in Britain were spooked and frightened by Franklin's apparent -- overstated -- mastery of this demon electricity, and considered him a dangerous sorceror.

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[dada]

Love it. And hey, maybe it really was sabotage. Never know, could be true, even in spite of being something thought by a king.

"You are saying, to paraphrase, 'he came up with his ideas while also being someone who held slave auctions at his printing offices' (editor: for advertisers who were auctioning slaves), without which we cannot know if he would have come up with his ideas'. If so, correct."

No, I'm saying the slaves and sweatshop workers deserve at least equal credit for making the whole operation possible. The electricity could not be thought without them, like the symphonies of the mass culture greats could not have been composed without the mountain of historically faceless souls that made their operations possible. The music is an expression of the conditions of mass production, not magically "whipped up" in a vacuum by mozart and beethoven. The electricity is a product of the slaves and sweatshops that made Franklin's culture possible, without which he would have no time to dabble in the kinds of refined thoughts and hobbies that electricity comes from.

[JackRiddler]

Love it. And hey, maybe it really was sabotage. Never know, could be true, even in spite of being something thought by a king.

"You are saying, to paraphrase, 'he came up with his ideas while also being someone who held slave auctions at his printing offices' (editor: for advertisers who were auctioning slaves), without which we cannot know if he would have come up with his ideas'. If so, correct."

No, I'm saying the slaves and sweatshop workers deserve at least equal credit for making the whole operation possible. The electricity could not be thought without them, like the symphonies of the mass culture greats could not have been composed without the mountain of historically faceless souls that made their operations possible. The music is an expression of the conditions of mass production, not magically "whipped up" in a vacuum by mozart and beethoven. The electricity is a product of the slaves and sweatshops that made Franklin's culture possible, without which he would have no time to dabble in the kinds of refined thoughts and hobbies that electricity comes from.

Sure. That's what I thought you said, I just didn't explicate it at the same length, or with the same refinement.

It's also still not what I said. After the precise context of its origins and Franklin himself and the auctioneers and their victims are all long gone, the Franklin lightning rod still works better than the competing designs. And the discussion here is about which is the better lightning rod. Or to drop the metaphor, which is the better description of how money actually works? The discussion here is less about the conditions under which the various ideas were conceived -- except insofar as those change the idea itself, which of course they can and always do to an extent. So you can always turn the discussion about models of the origins of an object into one about the origins of the models, often justifiably. For example, it is surely relevant that the plainly false deficit-hawkery and goldbug ideas are nevertheless functionally serviceable to the classes who most often propound them, and that this is doubtless why they persist, despite the serial failure to describe crises, after which Larry Summers still doesn't go away. But this focus on origin-of-models rather than models-of-origin can also be inserted to the exclusion of and distraction from the attempt to understand the objects we might hope to describe in the first place. For the purposes of this thread, at least to me, the origins and functions and operations of money, and the question of which of several models describes them more accurately, are more interesting questions than the origins of the models, which are important (or can be) but ultimately secondary. I'm still going to ask: Which lightning rod design captures and successfully channels more lightning to the ground?

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[dada]

So you see, it's kind this reversal of everything. Now it's the people's electricity, and rightfully so.

The peoples music, too. But they are only heard now as if the music itself is the achingly perfectly heart breaking sound that all the crying ghosts make in chorus.

[JackRiddler]

So you see, it's kind this reversal of everything. Now it's the people's electricity, and rightfully so.

The peoples music, too. But they are only heard now as if the music itself is the achingly perfectly heart breaking sound that all the crying ghosts make in chorus.

Okay, I'm all for the people's monetary theory. I see no necessary contradiction and in fact plenty of confluence between mmt and marxian approaches, and between mmt and anti-capitalist thinking. That being said, while I consider it accurate in description, it's also reformist in thrust -- but it's the kind of reform that would help improve, not worsen, the conditions under which most suffer.

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[dada]

Right, I get what you are using the lightning rod for, here on this thread. And while I appreciate what that is, discussing which is better - Franklin's clearly is by the way, so I don't know what there is to discuss - I'm using it in a different way.

It is not about chickens and eggs, although I'm sure that Franklin tried cooking both with his contraptious deathtraps at one time or another. I'm talking about the language. The lighting rod only works if it is grounded in the dead souls within the machinery of mass production. Therefore the "best lightning rod" has nothing to do with the origin or the model, but if it is hooked up right, meaning "running adequately" to fry the chicken or the egg.

So the language of the theory is what I'm using the lightning rod metaphor. The question here isn't, as I understand it, to be which model is best, but which language is best for calling down the lightning and channeling into the frying contraption.

[dada]

"Hopefully the writer gets across to the reader the general idea, that nothing can stop the mass production. Because only when the readers know it with all their heart can anything resembling real work begin."

I should be clear, I'm not talking heavy lifting, mother theresa. The reader is a fellow in the craft, reading is not a profession, but part of the writer's job description. The real work is thought production, on the next order of business.

Thought production on the present order, is what the certainty of knowing it with all your heart is intended to stop. I mean knowing it with all your heart that the regular work of thought production is worse than useless, to fill the next order.

[JackRiddler]

The lighting rod only works if it is grounded in the dead souls within the machinery of mass production.

On this we differ. It's possible that the lightning rod could only have been invented, or would only have been produced, if it were grounded in the dead souls. (Are you sure, have you thought through all the implications of that?) However, the lightning rod once produced works (as well as possible, better than other models). Or it doesn't.

[Belligerent Savant]

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interesting turn of phrase, "grounded in the dead souls", given the discovery of dead souls -- or rather, human remains -- within the ground underneath Franklin's home, reportedly due to the medical curiosities of Franklin's housemate William Hewson.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-ne ... ns-524521/

Perhaps the more creative types among us can find a way to incorporate this into the ongoing, lengthy analogies on display here.