2021年1月27日水曜日

再掲:2020/06 Zachary Carter, "The Price of Peace" and Stephanie Kelton, "The Deficit ...

2020/06/12
https://youtu.be/-h41VUC_fdI 

ケインズ12:00

15:00〜17:20

good evening everyone and welcome to politics and prose live we're joined here tonight by stephanie kelton and zachary carter let's talk about their new books before we get started I just want to give some quick housekeeping notes for everyone you can purchase both of tonight's books by clicking on the green button right below the speakers we encourage everyone to do that to help support our authors and also politics and prose also tonight we're gonna encourage you guys to ask questions which many of you already have the back portion of our event will be dedicated to your questions so if you click on the ask a question widget at the bottom you can see where people have already asked questions you can ask your question and you can vote on the questions that you're most interested in hearing our authors answer and lastly just a reminder to everyone that you can see us but we cannot see you so feel free to relax and get comfortable so without any further ado it is my honor to welcome stephanie kelton professor of economics and public policy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a Bloomberg contributing columnist tonight she's here to discuss her new book the deficit myth modern monetary theory and the birth of the people's economy tonight we were all so lucky to be joined by Zachary T Carter who is a senior reporter at Huffington Post where he covers Congress the White House and economic policy tonight he will be discussing his book the price of peace money democracy and the life of John Maynard Keynes so without any further ado you know Zachary and Stephanie hi everybody it's really nice to be with you I want to start by talking to Stephanie about her book which is called the deficit myth Stephanie all I hear about when I listen to economic commentary is this talk about debt and deficits there was a tweet from the Lincoln project this new group of a sort of anti-trump Republicans talking about how Donald Trump had run up seventeen point eight trillion dollars of national debt there are always columns running in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal The New York Times about debt debt debt but your book calls the deficit he talks about as a myth what do you mean by the deficit myth and why do you feel that this book wasn't according to right at this point in time well thank you and thanks to politics and prose for having both of us here to spend some time talking about our new projects it's really pleasure to be with you so first let me start by saying that increasing the deficit and adding to the national debt is probably the least bad thing that Donald Trump has done I think we should just get that out there look I understand that that we are inundated from you know the media mainstream press politicians everybody who talks about deficits in debt virtually everybody talks about it in a negative way right when we hear people bring up the deficit it is almost always the case that they're there they are there to complain about the thing or the national debt these are presented to us as as problems at a at a minimum and as a national security threat or a threat to future generations I mean a real danger to us individually your share of the national debt borrowing from China all of these things that create a lot of anxiety on the part of the American people so when you say you know why did you write this book I think that you know my my hope is that I can reduce the level of anxiety I mean I start in Chapter one of the book telling a story about you know being a child and watching the television show Sesame Street and you know Sesame Street was really good at teaching us to sort of separate things into categories these things are similar these things are unlike the rest of them and you know as a kid my sister and I would watch and we would play along as the images came on the screen and they put up you know a bicycle and an automobile and a train and a tennis shoe they say you know one of these things is not like the other eye so we would haul her back at the television the shoe the shoe is not like the others you know and so I in the book I say that I'm an adult now I'm still hollering back at the television all the time because I turn on the TV and I hear you know often you know so-called experts on economics talking about the deficit or the debt in ways that I think are just fundamentally wrong and that they are getting some big things wrong and I'm hollering back at the TV so the reason I wrote the book I think is to try to get us to a better place to a better understanding where we can have a more meaningful and fruitful discussion about deficits in the national debt and government finances that ultimately I hope will get us to a place where we make better public policy so a really common criticism than you hear from people who talk about modern monetary theory or stephanie kelton is that is that you believe that deficits don't matter they're irrelevant this just came out in a you know there was a relatively nasty review in The Wall Street Journal where somebody accused you of this do you believe that deficits don't matter what what what do you make of this fatigue so you know it's funny because if you go to the webpage that I created to talk about the book it literally reads Dick Cheney says deficits don't Reagan prove deficits don't matter he was wrong so there I am right saying I disagree with Cheney's characterization that deficits don't matter my argument in the book and throughout my work is really that deficits matter but not the way in which we've been taught to believe that they matter so we've been taught as I said earlier that that they're inherently dangerous undesirable that you're there's something that you do in times of crisis because you have no choice like now but that in more normal times deficits are something we ought to be avoiding governments should not spend more than they take in in the form of taxes they should strive to balance budgets and avoid increasing the debt and so I walk through in the book a variety of ways in which deficits matter and one important way is every deficit is good for someone I mean that is the reality and so when you see the reap publicans passing these huge tax cuts at the end of 2017 these were massive tax cuts that Republicans passed knowing that they would massively increase deficits so if Republicans really believe that deficits were inherently dangerous and that they were gonna wreak havoc and all these bad things were gonna happen in future grandchildren they wouldn't do that the reality is that the Republicans understand I think perfectly well that every deficit is good for someone and so what they did was to massively cut taxes on corporations.
and the wealthiest people in this country 83% of the benefits went to people in the top 1% of the income distribution in other words those who least needed the help but the deficits that the government ran and are running become financial surpluses in somebody else's pocket their deficits become our surpluses their red ink is our black ink the question is who's our right who's benefiting from that financial windfall Republicans are happy to run deficits because they know that they create a financial surplus that they can direct into the hands of the people that they're most interested in helping and what I I would hope is that Democrats would reach the point where they to understand that deficits aren't something we should be striving to wrestle down and reduce but that the deficit can be used as a tool to carry out an agenda that serves the broader public that benefits people who are truly hurting and so that's a lot of what I talk about in the book it feels to me like when I when I read your work whether it's in this book or blog posts op-eds that you've written over the years interviews that you've done there is a real emphasis on on economic distribution whether it's the distribution of actual resources how you how you move supply chains from point A to point B or what kind of society you want to live in in terms of particularly economic inequality and the focus seems to be on on a sort of social vision more so than a I don't want to I don't want to say you're not an economist here but but the the way the traditional economists focus on on debt and deficits is sort of the primary way of understanding the economy you seem to have to my mind at least a sort of broader social vision there first of all is that an accurate description of of the way you think about your own work and second what do you think it says about the economics profession that we have this focus on on debt and deficits instead of these other these other social priorities yeah it's a you know in the in the book chapter 7 is called the deficits that matter and so that's exactly what I'm trying to do to redirect our obsession with deficits to the very real deficits that surround us in our everyday lives and that are crushing in many ways for millions and millions of people in this country so you are right that for me I look at the federal budget as a world document and the federal government there are our elected officials and they get to write and pass a budget that determines where financial resources will be dedicated and to what ends and in my view anyway our elected officials are there to act in the interest of the broad majority I mean the people of this country right and if the people of this country indicate that they want you know everybody to have health care for example then I think that Congress should be looking for ways to budget our nation's real resources so that we can deliver those that material well-being to people so MMT is about saying listen the easiest part of any agenda is finding the money that's the easiest part the challenge is how many of our nation's real productive resources how many of our workers how many people how many how much of our factories how many machines how much real resources do we want directed to producing public goods health care education infrastructure I know those sorts of things and how much do we want to leave to the private sector and so there is a balance there and when I talk about addressing the deficits that matter whether its climate or retirement security or you know education student loan debt health care all of that is in that chapter that I talk about I am I'm I'm focusing in ways that are maybe not common among economists to think about directing real resources to solve real problems in our economy I have to say that that focus reminds me quite a bit of a fellow who I've spent a great deal of time studying I don't know if you've heard of him.
 Stephanie his his name is John Maynard Keynes are you familiar with his work.



Kelton:12:00
 am i familiar with his work that guy 

Z:

yeah it's a famous political cartoon on that on that mug of Keynes looking kind of like a spider in the chair I think frankly a very lanky yeah you know I one of the things I loved about studying Keynes is that he is he's one of these kind of broad broad thinkers he's he's he's kind of an economist by accident I think I I feel like he you know his life is is one where he's he's constantly surrounded by all these philosophers and artists and these great writers like Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey and Ian Forester who you know you know all the Merchant Ivory you know sweepy melodramas from the 80s at 90s he would get you know early drafts of ianforster books before before they came out and he forced would be like don't tell anybody but but let me know what you think Maynard and he was concerned with art and letters and ideas and and this sort of big grand vision of society and he kind of just realized that economics was the the science that he could he could pursue that would give his ideas sort of access to power and I I feel like when I read his work you know his very technical economic work like like the gender theory is often extremely dense and kind of like it's kind of like eating a pretzel covered in thorns it's just like very nasty and at times but but a lot of his other work his essays his letters they're very very clear he has the ability to distill these big complex ideas into into you know fragments that ordinary people can understand because I think he's he's fundamentally concerned with ordinary people and what they can understand because he believes the economy is not this sort of like weird thing that has to be hived off away from social policy he believes it's it's a way to address the social policy that he cares about he's concerned with war and peace and authoritarianism and democracy and all the big problems of the early 20th century and when I read that stuff III have to say I feel like the the economics profession today doesn't seem to be working at the same level of ambition for the most part there are exceptions clearly and there are a lot of very good economists out there but the idea that you would you would sit down within it I feel like economists are there to tell us no that we can't do the things that we want to do we can't solve the problems that we need to solve and so my question for you Stephanie here is what are the big problems that economists need to solve today if it's not debt and deficits what what should the great minds from academia be focusing their attention on if it's not debt and deficits.
Kelton:15:00

 well I think in a moment it seems to me that the obvious answer is unemployment and this is of course the big problem that Keynes wrestled with in the general theory because the economy was in the grips of a Great Depression and so here we find ourselves yet again with you know tens of millions of people who have lost jobs in the course of the shortest span of this magnitude of job losses in our nation's history so we got to figure that out I think that probably right now there's no higher calling than to deal with unemployment but you know you you know this you you and I know a lot of these people there are economists all over the country down I you and I might agree that there aren't enough but there are economists that are also engaging in the climate space not necessarily as experts on climate science but there are environmental economists who are working in collaboration.

 you mentioned Keynes you know working alongside philosophers and people with areas of expertise outside his own and I think those collaborative efforts are really important whether it comes to health care or education there are things that economists can do and ways in which we can be useful.
but we I think need to sometimes show some humility and recognize that scholars in other fields also bring an awful lot to the table and to the extent that we could work better together and I make economists or sometimes not very good at this we think that our discipline sits higher in the in the pyramid in hierarchy than a lot of other disciplines and so you know unemployment healthcare the environment I mean the list of problems as I said I did a chapter in the book on this but I want to talk about your book wonderful people who are here what made you want to study this man who I think is a fascinating figure but what was it about him that made you want to study and spend years I presume studying his his life.


z:17:17
 so I didn't come at Cain's from traditional economics background I don't have a PhD I don't know the masters I studied philosophy as an undergraduate but in 2006 the job I sort of fell into after I graduated from college was a job as a financial journalist and I was living in central Virginia working for a trade publication that's now part of S&P global but I wasn't terribly thrilled to be covering banking as a 22 year old it just didn't seem like you know the most exciting job in the world but then the banking sector did me a huge favor and exploded and it became very very excite to cover the banking sector and and there was this very clear shift that happened over the course of 2007 and 2008 where everybody who I talked to in the markets was like oh look we got we all we all agree the markets irrational we all agree that supply and demand to find automatically find a prosperous equilibrium we all know that that the thing things are gonna work out if the government just stays out of the way and they move very quickly to saying oh well obviously the government needs to intervene immediately to rescue the financial sector otherwise the economy is going to collapse in society is going to fall into disrepair and and when that shift happened I mean people were very open with me at least financial market participants we're very open with me about the fact that they were changing their minds I don't want to accuse these people of hypocrisy but but all of a sudden they were talking about this guy John Maynard Keynes and saying his ideas were irrelevant.
 and they were they were key in a way where previously he had been sort of kind of dismissed to the academic margins if you were a Keynesian specialist as an economist you know I guess you could have like Paul Krugman had a job at the New York Times but academically it wasn't taken super seriously you had to work for a particularly you know specialist Keynesian institution if you were an academic and and then the markets people just didn't really talk about it like it was a real thing and suddenly it was just totally legitimate and I thought that was incredible I thought that shift was remarkable not only because people had changed their tune but because the the possibilities that were available in terms of policymaking just seemed incredibly broad and the specific policies that we pursued in 2008 where we can basically bailed out the financial sector and let everybody else kind of twist in the wind that struck me is a not terribly great way to go about rescuing an economy and it struck me as odd that a fellow who was this famous would would prescribe something like that so I went and started reading Keynes and I tried to read the general theory and like I said the general theory is that it's a real nasty piece of work like if you wanna if you want to give yourself a big headache go just open the general theory and start on pay one and try to get through it it's it's a brilliant book it's one of the great great triumphs of Western Letters but it is also it's like reading you know Nietzsche or Heidegger or something.

20:13

where you have to slog through dozens of pages of just nasty crazy nonsense until you get to that one gem where suddenly you know that the sees part and the skies open and you're like oh my goodness this man is brilliant but I went and read the economic consequences of the peace which is his critique of the Treaty of Versailles the the treaty that ends World War one in 1919 and this is a much clearer document it's much easier to understand economically it's not nearly as sophisticated as what made makes him famous I think today as an economist but the moral and philosophical force of the document and the political ideas that are involved I think are just as urgent as everything in the general theory and as as really any piece of political writing I've ever encountered in that book just it just kind of lit a fire under man this guy is onto something really serious it's a book about political accountability he says essentially the leaders who have organized this peace treaty have saddled every country with insurmountable debts whether it's the war debts for the Allies as you know that they've assumed over the course of the war or the reparations duties that have been it that have been assessed on Germany that you know who lost World War one obviously and as a result people are going to be shipping money across different borders and they're not going to have the funds available to mobilize those real resources that are going to make their economies recover and and generate prosperity.
and that the really I think brilliant point is that that's not just going to be an economic problem people are going to going to blame outsiders for the fact that they're not recovering and they're not going to be totally wrong because they will be shipping capital abroad that could be spent at home.
and and that's going to fuel international resentment it's going to lead to dictatorship and war and I thought that connection between economic dysfunction and social crisis was something that I just had not you know I felt this sense of unfairness over the bailouts in 2008 but I didn't feel like they were economists who were put together saying like okay well the reason these numbers appear to add up on paper but actually result in socially terrible results that just didn't feel like that was something that was coming coming down from on high from people whether they're Republicans or Democrats in positions of economic expertise and Keynes in in his work I felt like this deep deep moral force and and also this this concern for for things that were not really about dollars and cents like he he was concerned about the equations balancing but he was really just afraid of dictatorship and war he was focused on that big kind of social problem it's you know not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow it's like it's like the march of fascism at the end of the rainbow but he was he was afraid of something bad happening to society and to commute into his community not of of you know an equation that failed to balance appropriately and and so I just became completely obsessed with a guy and I was a philosophy student so I found a lot of his ideas it was very easy to understand him as a philosopher more so than as a you know it economy trician he was not he was not somebody who cared deeply about mathematics even though he studied mathematics as an undergraduate when he was when he was at Cambridge so he doesn't even have a degree in mathematics he's what in economics he's one of the greatest economists who's ever lived in his Greece in mathematics not not economics because he's he's kind of early to the profession it's something that's just kind of being born when he's studying as an undergraduate so I wrote this book because of the crash of 2008 and my feeling of confusion about where the world was going and my feeling of deep kind of moral despair and I felt like Keynes was somebody who could speak to that sense of of uncertainty and and of unfairness frankly that was that was in the air at the time.




kelton:24:20
I feel like you know you must feel almost in a sense like you know him like you're so inside his head that and you and you come to this in the moment right on the you know precipice of the natural crisis and the meltdown global economic meltdown and you talk about you know the Treaty of Versailles and the reparations that were imposed on Germany and how Keynes could foresee the kinds of the rise of fascism and the social unrest and all of that how did it feel working on this project and looking at what was happening in Europe where you know the Greek debt crisis not just Greece but the countries didn't not feel like you were living the moment.

z:25:

oh it's terrifying I remember being so I went to Cambridge to go through his papers at King's College at Cambridge University in the spring of 2017 and and this was past the like worst days of of the Greek debt crisis but every single week you would see headlines about about you know Golden Dawn and these these horrible like far-right fascist parties that were rising up in Greece and other other countries it wasn't just like these fringe parties the conservative parties were sort of also sort of subsuming these these fringe parties and because making it part of their they're kind of like more mainstream conservative the you know policy agenda and and it was it was deeply frightening you you would just go through his papers and you'd be like I'm really really worried that Germany is gonna go fascist pretty soon I'm really really worried that Italy's gonna go fascist pretty soon and boom they would do it you know you just keep turning the pages through the documents he's like oh Mussolini has taken power in Rome I'm sad and the the idea that there was an economic connection between these things to Keynes was just obvious it was common sense I feel like you kind of have to argue that now in the United States in this weird way politically that that there's a connection between economic policy and social disruption this way which I don't I don't think you actually have to do in Europe in Europe people just kind of accept this they might deny whether or not their particular policymaking is responsible from further rise of fascism but the idea that these things are connected is is just common sense over there so in a certain sense it was it was nice being around a people who I think sort of saw this connection between economic and social policy the way I did certainly being in DC you would just talk to people on the hill in the bi oh well you know all we care about is growth and so long as that so long as we have growth everything's fine and you kind of like I okay but you know there are these people in the industrial Midwest who like don't have jobs and their communities are rotting like are you you're not worried about that like no because of all the growth you just like what what much why would you look at these metrics this way and I felt like I don't know there are some things with Keynes when you go through his letters he just has this incredible capacity to communicate to other people and and he you could I don't want to say that he felt the way I felt looking at these things but I felt a real sense of there was a real resonance with a lot of his letters when he's talking about coal miners going on strike in 1926 and saying we're not gonna work for this terrible wage anymore you want to sit you want us to eat at ten or twelve percent pay cut you know you know buzz off and in Keynes being like what are the oh my god they're gonna there's gonna be a huge strike the country is gonna go into revolt and of course the country did go and revolt in 1926 they have this huge general strike in Britain and it's this enormous moment of upheaval where all of the labor unions just refuse to go to work because of the conditions that are being demanded from the government and I you know in a sense I feel like we're seeing some of that today I you know obviously George Floyd's killing is the the spark for all the unrest around the country in the United States right now but I think there underlying that is there's this deep sense of unfairness that that everything not just the police but everything in life is slated against working people whatever color they are but particularly black and brown people and that and that there's there's no way to guarantee yourself that you know that that tomorrow is going to be better than today that that the political system has abandoned not just a not just a few people the margins but most of the country really and I think that that sort of sense of that crisis is something that Keynes was concerned with it it always it just makes his writing come alive in a way that most you know when I read an economics journal like you know I've read plenty of academic economic material it doesn't have the same sort of fire behind it when you know you think about canes and Keynesian economics people I think think that oftentimes what I gather is that people think that Keynesian economics means that government is supposed to prime the pump you know just kind of grease the wheels when the economy slows down you you do a little bit of fiscal stimulus you increase government spending a bit and then you can safely take your hands off and the economy will find its way back to an equilibrium path and there's no need for sustained presence on the part of the federal government so looking at where we are today and recognizing that the risks are continued social unrest and you know opportunities for people who might want to take advantage of those anxieties and that unrest you know take us a note in a fascist direction what do you think if we could have Keynes in this chat box with us you know would he say do something to safeguard the American people you got to provide jobs for everyone you have to safeguard health care you have to provide education would he embrace do you think an FDR style New Deal program for the 21st century you know I think he would be I think he would approve of your work Stephanie but I think he'd be very frustrated by the fact that it's necessary.
 I think he would he would say you know look we know that these technical questions about money and numbers are just technical questions about money in numbers we have a climate crisis that's approaching us we have this huge breakdown in international relations between the United States and China the European Union is disintegrating and we know what's happened in the past when the European states have gone and have not gotten along it has not been good for the rest of the world and we have deep inequality and just about unit in every country however you know whatever stage of development we want to describe them as being and we have deep inequality within each country and then also between countries so he would I think be talking about he would be trying to devise some grand plan that could be used to kill many of these birds at once there with you know with with one stone I mean I he really liked birds so I don't think he'll be trying to kill birds with stones one of his big complaints about America was that there were not enough birds in the countryside here he felt like the English countryside had had far more birds so it's really a much nicer place but he when what he would want to try to do more than one thing with his economic policy he wouldn't just want to cure unemployment he would want to also solve the climate crisis he would want to fix the relationship between the United States and China and then he'd probably ask a probably a separate agenda for Europe frankly it's just you know it's this so only so much you can do with one policy but it'd be a very grand plan and it's not the sort of thing that you can do by just asking you know JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley to you know to you know lower some interest rates on some loans it's it's not something that can be done without coordination somewhere so he would look to the state I think as the body that could coordinate this type of action what he would prescribe you know I find it hard to predict frankly like he is somebody who is always changing his mind it he was not ashamed to change his mind one of the things I admire most about him really you know he got all sorts of stuff wrong he's deeply politically naive you know in a lot of ways I think is just too conservative and just misunderstands the way the world works but he is ok with admitting when he's wrong and in changing course it's hard for me to imagine it I think he was probably smarter than I am and may may be able to come up with with big plans that I have not I have not seen but I do think he'd be looking at people who were rolling out proposals like the green New Deal and saying that's the kind of thinking we should be we should be working with we should not be working with these sort of tax incentives to encourage certain types of private and private behavior he would say look we have we have crises that have to be managed so let's go ahead and let's go ahead and manage them and then he would not have been a nudge guy I mean I do not want I know in a rip cass sunstein because he he tweeted out something nice about my book so cass you know appreciate it but no i don't think so i think i think keynes it depends on which cans you know cuz he he is he's he changes his mind like i said over the course of his career but certainly by the end of his life you know kings losses almost every single political battle that he engages in between 1919 and 1941 when he starts winning it's when the Labour Party is in power in Britain and they're the socialist labor power late Labour Party very very explicitly socialist in an era when being socialist was a much more like dangerous thing than it is today and the thing that he his first real policy victory is serving as the financial kind of technician for the British National Health Service so he socializes British medicine and in is not a minor player in that he is one of the main guys who gets the British National Health and Health Service enacted and he's doing this when Britain's basically broke and in World War World War two when when you know the Blitz has devastated Britain and they've had they've lost so buddy thousands of lives in in the war so you know he's somebody who's capable of thinking very very big even even with your back up against the wall and I certainly think he would be if he could if he can social his British medicine in 1943 I'd certainly think the new the green New Deal would seem like a pre you know that in a lot of ways I feel like Cannes Cannes would have been mortified by the the rhetoric of the Bernie Sanders campaign not not to bust up your old boss or maybe it's your current boss I don't know but the talk about revolution would have made Cannes very very uncomfortable but in in certain respects I think he he would have said you know the the policy agenda that that Sanders is pursuing is if anything maybe a little too timid you know you have to think big these these crises are very real and they're bearing down upon society right now and we are seeing the effects of them in real time so I I certainly would see him as somebody who would be who would be talking about the green New Deal and and coming up with some very very complex diplomatic solution that probably none of his diplomatic solutions ever worked so it probably wouldn't have worked but some some way to try to resolve the tensions between United States and China let me ask you one more question and then I know there are a lot of people who want to jump in with with their own questions but you know we hear people talk about in inequality income and wealth inequality all the time now I mean there's this just commonplace but Keynes opens the last chapter of the general theory the first sentence to the last chapter of the book reads from memory something like the two great flaws in our economic system are its failure to provide for full employment think about where we are today and its arbitrary and unjust distribution of income maybe he says income in wealth you know I probably don't remember it exactly but Keynes called out you know then when levels of income and wealth distribution the the degree of inequality looks a whole lot like it does today so I just wondered and and I don't really recall seeing greater treatment of that question the inequality piece in Keynes's other work but I haven't read it the way that you have and I wondered whether you discovered that he had a lot more to say about inequality and so his other writing yeah Keynes is deeply concerned about economic inequality because he's worried about societies being able to hang together he's worried primarily about revolution he's he's a perky and conservative in the sense where he doesn't want to see the people rising up and overthrowing the system he thinks that the disorder and chaos that results from revolution is not worth whatever prosperity might come from a new system that is built so he's always trying to to sort of do what you can with the existing structures of society but if you if you go back and read the economic consequences of the peace his big work from from 1919 he basically says look economic inequality is unfair and the economic system of the Gilded Age which basically ended at the opening of World War one was a ripoff for working people and and the only reason people bought into this was because they believed sincerely that tomorrow was going to be better than today and once you break that faith in the future which the war had done it'll be impossible to restart this engine now I think the story that Keynes is telling there and in 1919 is wrong I don't think it's the case that people had this deep faith in the future in 1908 or 1903 and thought really if they just kept working hard enough that tomorrow would be better than today I think he was coming from a particularly elite perspective but he is clearly concerned with the idea that escalating inequality is unsustainable that you have to find some way to make people feel part of the same social project together and that moves that idea is deeper than his economic sort of technical policy prescriptions he's he's much more concerned with these sort of moral and political beliefs than he is with whatever particular policy agenda that he did he's concocted at any given time to try to pursue this so you know there there are periods in time when he's basically like a Milton Friedman kind of style monetarist but when that doesn't work he just says okay well let's do something else so I think inequality matters to him on this moral level that is is it is fundamental to the way that he thinks about the world and and and he he just does not believe that deeply unequal societies will be able to hang together and he says this from the position of somebody who wants to enjoy all the fruits of being on top he he loves going to the Opera and art openings and he was married to a ballerina the most famous ballerina in London you know he's just you know he loves the high life but he doesn't want to lose it and he feels like if you do not have a more equal society if you don't let people participate in that high life then he won't get to enjoy it either because people will revolt yeah.

and you said you said a more equal and that's another thing that he points out in that last chapter he's not talking about an egalitarian district of income and wealth in fact he says you know we just have too much inequality and so what we need to do is you know rein it in but he he goes out of his way to make the argument that certain amount of inequality in his view actually does serve some useful purpose in terms of you know incentivizing people and innovation and that sort of thing right yeah and Stephanie I want to ask you this question about your work cuz I I feel like there are times when the focus on mmt is understandably about deficits and debt but in a lot of ways I think the sort of more radical implications of your work seem to me and correct me if I'm wrong to suggest that we can focus more on these questions of distribution than we do on on questions of say growth which is what economists typically are saying you know so long as we grow the pie everybody's better off it might am I wrong about that if I misread you in some way.


kelton:41:00
no do you mean questions of distribution just with respect to income and wealth with inequality right right any part yeah so one of the things that mmm tears have always pointed out with respect to what is the role of taxes in the economy we've been taught to believe that taxes are primarily useful because they're the source of revenue to the federal government's how the government pays the bills and mmt rejects that and says no taxes are important for a lot of reasons but that ain't one of them and one of the reasons that taxes are important is because it does give the government gives Congress a lever to pull to realign the distribution of wealth and income if they want to make adjustments to the tax code not because they need to peel a few bucks off of a billionaire here and a billionaire there to fund education or do some infrastructure investment but because they genuinely want to tackle the problem of extreme concentrations of wealth and income inequality in this country then it's perfectly legitimate to set forth with an ambitious agenda to adjust taxes on the very wealthy for no other reason - then to realign the balance of distribution I think in a lot of ways Zack we don't go far enough because we look at the very wealthy as a pay-for and lawmakers say well we want to you know do infrastructure we want to put some more money in education we want to improve lives for the broad majority of people but we feel like we have to pay for it somehow so we got to get money and we get money by raising revenue and we don't want to hurt the people in the middle and the people at the bottom so we're gonna concentrate all the pain at the very top that's where the taxes will fall the problem from my perspective is while that might be perfectly legitimate to try to pass a bill that says we're gonna spend to you know increase money for Pell grants or infrastructure or whatever and alongside that we're gonna increase taxes on the rich very often what I've observed in my brief time in the Senate and in my longer journey as just an observer of you know the political process is that even Democrats are very reluctant to increase taxes on people at the top there's this notion that it's punishing success in some way and you know the job creators will be heard and we you know so what happens is we pair that you know desire to spend more on education or whatever with a need to raise taxes so that we don't end up adding to the deficit and that forces lawmakers to pick two fights and you don't just have to pick two fights you have to win two fights you have to convince enough of your colleagues to vote for the increased spending on education and you have to convince them to close the tax loopholes or you know to introduce a wealth tax or whatever it is and if you can't win both of those fights you don't win on your agenda you don't get the increased spending for education so you know it's it's a double-edged sword this game of trying to play by pay-go rules to avoid adding to the deficit but mmm tears and myself included look at Democrats sometimes and say you know when you approach taxes this way you're not being nearly ambitious enough because you're just trying to peel off enough to cover the cost of whatever it is you're trying to do so in the case of a wealth tax for example if if the wealth tax is to take 2% from you know people with very large fortunes and then at the same time tell them but don't worry you're not even gonna feel it because your wealth is going to accumulate at a much higher rate on an annual basis than what's in a sense what's the point right what's the point if they're not going to feel it you're not gonna address the extreme concentrations of wealth inequality so I do approach the tax question differently and I think I come at it with a more ambitious desire to see realignment and rebalancing you know these extreme concentrations of income and wealth inequality aren't just bad for the way our economy functions it's bad for the way our democracy works so before we go and Tom I think I think we will want to have some questions from the audience a second but before we do that Stephanie I have a question for you about sort of the the Washington legitimacy kind of etiquette because I feel like for a long time there are very good people on Capitol Hill who are you know brilliant thoughtful folks who will listen to arguments no matter where they come from but there are a lot of people on Capitol Hill who are not brilliant and not thoughtful and and they don't so much listen to the arguments as they listen to like the prestige that surrounds the person who is saying them so like you know in 1989 if Alan Greenspan had showed up on the hill and told everybody that actually all horses are really hand grenades so we really have to stop riding them because they're about to explode people would have just said oh man you know I really got to stop writing all these horses and they would have they would have believed him did you notice a difference because you've been talking about this stuff for a long time did you notice a difference in the way that you were treated by folks on the hill after you started working for the Senate Budget Committee did that did that have a any sort of change in the in the way that you're sort of ideas seem to resonate with with staff no I don't think they resonated with staff item I don't feel well Zac I talked about it a little bit in the book you know I think there was a certain degree of surprise when I showed up that you know they were accustomed to dealing with deficit hawks people who want to balance the budget really fast get it done and get it done quick and the deficit doves who were sort of more apologetic and tolerant of deficits while they also wanted to see them balanced they were willing to go more slowly but those are the only two sort of birds they were accustomed to and then I show up and you know I cleaned that phrase years ago the deficit owl to distinguish my own views from these other from these other birds and I remember that yeah you've been you've been living there in Texas right no I'm in Virginia but yes we have we have this family of our but they got back fantastic I think of the deficit al every time I see you tweet a picture but the quick story is that people were taken aback they didn't a lot of folks didn't realize exactly what I was and that people actually had views like I held and I think it took some getting used to.

and you know I think it over a period of time maybe there's been they've been taken more seriously but it I wouldn't say that it happened in that short kind of span of time that I was there there was a warming up to but not not a full embracive mm-hmm by the way I think ok well Tom I think we're ready to field some questions here if if you got it has anyone asked any questions yet we have quite a few actually we're not gonna have a chance to get to all of them but I will read the ones that have the most votes so the first question with the most votes is what if any would be the impact of mmt on the Social Security trust funds which consists exclusively of special obligation Treasury bonds like that's for you Stephanie well okay so mmm tea per se doesn't have an impact on Social Security but I did write a whole chapter on anti Dolan's and tried to make the point that you know FDR set up social security back in 1935 and he argued that he'd set it up the way he did so that these are his words so that no damn politician could ever put his hands on my Social Security program that was almost a direct quote and what he did was say that everybody was going to pay into it you were gonna see your contribution in the form of a payroll tax withholding you'd see the money go in and then upon retirement you would draw your earned benefits right and so today we have a situation where we continue to believe that the only way the government can maintain its promises to future retirees to their dependents to the disabled is if there's enough money available to do that so we started as a consequence of alan greenspan and his commission in 1983 started building up this massive trust fund locking up digital dollars on a spreadsheet called a trust fund and saying well if we just have enough spreadsheet entries and there are enough dollars locked in place then we can release those dollars in the future when we need to make the benefit payments so mmt points out the insanity of this and the proposition that the government needs to lock up its own currency in digital form in order to be able to spend its own currency in the future and so you know what I argue in that chapter is that there's a really quick way I could do it with a single sentence amendment to the Social Security Act of 1935 I could make the whole problem quote-unquote go away with a one-sentence amendment to that act it's just about granting Congress the legal authority to make benefit payments regardless of the balance and the trust fund okay this next question you kind of talked about a little bit but is it's this person asks how do you think Keynes would have reacted to Congress's actions with Co good relief ie PPP loans and such how do you think he'd approach our current economic situation I don't hijack this one Stephanie but I think think this was sort of my territory you know I think Keynes wouldn't have been worried about the amount of money being spent I think he would agree with everything Stephanie is said about debt and deficits so far but I think he would have been deeply troubled by the way that the money has been spent and and about the conditions that have been placed on that money I think the point that Stephanie made earlier about about Keynes believing that the general theory of employment interest and money sort of unlocked this ability for the government to tackle inequality directly as as sort of a way to make markets work better I I think he would have looked at this rescue and said you know this is a lot of money for the richest people in the country and not a whole lot for everybody else and and I think you know he also would have been this is this is a more deeper philosophical question but the question about work versus welfare in particular you know Keynes didn't want people to have to work their whole lives he had this he had this sort of utopian view of a world which we all had 15 hour work weeks we spent the rest of the time you know doing art and in writing poetry I think he would have wanted that in a certain sense but he also understood that people take a great deal of moral and social satisfaction from from having a job no matter how many a horse they're working you might want them to not have to work all the time but he recognized that people like participating in their community through their work and so the fact that we were putting a lot of money into expanding unemployment payments instead of making sure that people didn't lose their jobs I think would have troubled him that that's like you know I think Keynesian scholars could could dispute me on that on that point but more broadly he would just said look we need to rescue the economy we have to do something and we and we do have to rescue the rich we do have to retic it's not good if all these corporations just fail but he would have said the focus needs to be on on income support for all of these people and I don't think the the bill that was passed by 96 to 0 margin in the Senate focused its priority on on the types of things that that they that animated canes throughout much most of his life this next question is for Stephanie this person wants to know if you could walk through the mechanism that explains why deficits do not matter well let me reiterate first that my position has that deficits do matter but not the way we've been taught to believe so they matter in a lot of ways there's the very and important source of corporate profits for one thing so let's put that aside because there's a Colette's key profit equation we don't have time to go through that but let me do it the quick and dirty way okay when I say every deficit is good for someone the deficit is the difference between two numbers right one number is how many dollars the government is spending into the economy the other number is how many dollars the government is subtracting out of the economy by taxing us primarily okay so that we use this term deficit to describe the condition when the government adds more dollars into the economy then it subtracts we call its deficit but what we forget is we could just as easily call it a surplus we're using the word deficit because we're describing what's happening on the government's ledger but if we were describing what's happening on the other ledger the outside of government part of the economy we would call it a surplus they spend a hundred in and only tax ninety away from us that ten dollars that gets deposited becomes our surplus the real question is who got it for whom and for what what was the government doing was it building hospitals and schools was it repairing infrastructure was it paying for health care was it dealing with climate change or did it just become a windfall to the people who least need the help so deficits matter a lot right they are a financial deposit that shows up on somebody else's bank account the question is you know for who and for what I think we only have time for one more question so I'm going to ask this one to Zack this person would like to know a little bit about Keynes and the Bloomsbury group so Keynes comes of age at the turn of the 20th century and he's hanging out with all of these people like Virginia Woolf and ianforster they're writers and artists and it's a a very is certainly given the strictures of British society at the early 20th century it's a very liberated group so these people are constantly swapping lovers Keynes is very enthusiastically gay for most of his life until he falls in love with the most famous ballerina in in Britain and marries her and then they have a wonderful marriage that lasts the rest of his life but these people in a lot of ways are sort of the the moral authority in Keynes's life he's not somebody who is looking around to Pete you know if you if you hang out on Capitol Hill long enough which I think both Stephanie and I have done you know for better force quite a bit people on Capitol Hill are sort of looking to like what you know what what business groups and lobbyists are gonna think about what they do Keynes did not he was never looking over his shoulder to say what's Farmar gonna say what's Wall Street gonna say he was looking over his shoulder to say like what's Virginia Woolf gonna think about what I'm doing he always felt this very intense moral pressure from these people in his life and and that pressure extended to the fact that he was even working in government at all they were like why are you wasting your time and in this terrible you know stuff of public administration I mean you could be a writer you could be a poet you could be a painter wouldn't that be a fine thing and and of course he's he's doing he's good at it right and it's it's actually quite good for the world that he's doing it because he's he's good at it but but they're constantly sort of riding him and saying you'll make sure that whatever that you do is living up to these ideals and Bloomsbury has this in certain respects I think very naive view of the world they think that the power of love and art and Letters is capable of breaking down all these barriers between people's that have been built up through political systems over time so if you if you just show people the right painting if you read them the right novels they'll be able to communicate across different borders.
 and different languages and understand each other it's a really beautiful vision and and they're constantly just telling canes like live up to that live up to that ideal and and they're the only people in the world who can really convince him that he's gone astray in any moral sense so I think canes as a as a member of the Bloomsbury set he's kind of an odd duck because he's the only economist in the Bloomsbury set everybody else is an artist or a writer but in a lot of ways he is sort of trying to realize their vision on the world stage it make it make it something that is material in concrete in in public policy and certainly by the end of his life I think he's quite successful with that I think the British National Health Service is a great example of that but you know his his great work his first great work the the economic consequences of the peace is largely you know an apology to Bloomsbury for his role in and financing the the First World War for for Britain he's basically telling everybody in Bloomsbury I was wrong this war was pointless and a lot of people died and it was for nothing you guys were right and I was wrong that that dynamic is there throughout his career and it's it's it's really significant I think it make it's one of the things that makes him a very unique economist well thank you so much guys this is a really fascinating talk I want to remind everyone that you can purchase the deficit myth and the price of Pete's piece by clicking the green button at the bottom of your screen and thank you so much Zachary and Stephanie for being here with us tonight thanks everybody thanks everyone no.

英語 (自動生成) この動画のチャットのリプレイはオフになっています。 Zachary Carter, "The Price of Peace" and Stephanie Kelton, "The Deficit Myth" 4,387 回視聴•2020/06/12 にライブ配信 134 9 共有 保存 Politics and Prose チャンネル登録者数 13.5万人 チャンネル登録 Stephanie Kelton, professor of economics and public policy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Bloomberg contributing columnist, has been called a “prophetic economist” and a “Rock Star” of progressive economics. Stephanie is the founder and of the top-rated economic blog New Economic Perspectives, and a member of the TopWonks network of the nation’s best thinkers. In 2016, Politico recognized her as one of the fifty people across the country most influencing the political debate. Zachary D. Carter is a senior reporter at HuffPost, where he covers Congress, the White House, and economic policy. He is a frequent guest on cable news and news radio, and his written work has also appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, and The American Prospect, among other outlets. His story, “Swiped: Banks, Merchants and Why Washington Doesn’t Work for You” was included in the Columbia Journalism Review’s compilation Best Business Writing. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Purchase Books Here: https://www.politics-prose.com/event/... もっと見る チャンネル登録者数 13.5万人 チャンネル登録 Stephanie Kelton, professor of economics and public policy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Bloomberg contributing columnist, has been called a “prophetic economist” and a “Rock Star” of progressive economics. Stephanie is the founder and of the top-rated economic blog New Economic Perspectives, and a member of the TopWonks network of the nation’s best thinkers. In 2016, Politico recognized her as one of the fifty people across the country most influencing the political debate. Zachary D. Carter is a senior reporter at HuffPost, where he covers Congress, the White House, and economic policy. He is a frequent guest on cable news and news radio, and his written work has also appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, and The American Prospect, among other outlets. His story, “Swiped: Banks, Merchants and Why Washington Doesn’t Work for You” was included in the Columbia Journalism Review’s compilation Best Business Writing. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Purchase Books Here: https://www.politics-prose.com/event/... 一部を表示

5
good evening everyone and welcome to
00:07
politics and prose live we're joined
00:09
here tonight by stephanie kelton and
00:10
zachary carter let's talk about their
00:12
new books before we get started I just
00:14
want to give some quick housekeeping
00:15
notes for everyone you can purchase both
00:18
of tonight's books by clicking on the
00:19
green button right below the speakers we
00:22
encourage everyone to do that to help
00:24
support our authors and also politics
00:26
and prose also tonight we're gonna
00:29
encourage you guys to ask questions
00:31
which many of you already have the back
00:33
portion of our event will be dedicated
00:35
to your questions so if you click on the
00:37
ask a question widget at the bottom you
00:40
can see where people have already asked
00:41
questions you can ask your question and
00:43
you can vote on the questions that
00:45
you're most interested in hearing our
00:46
authors answer and lastly just a
00:50
reminder to everyone that you can see us
00:52
but we cannot see you so feel free to
00:54
relax and get comfortable so without any
00:57
further ado it is my honor to welcome
00:59
stephanie kelton professor of economics
01:02
and public policy at the State
01:03
University of New York at Stony Brook
01:04
and a Bloomberg contributing columnist
01:07
tonight she's here to discuss her new
01:08
book the deficit myth modern monetary
01:11
theory and the birth of the people's
01:13
economy tonight we were all so lucky to
01:16
be joined by Zachary T Carter who is a
01:18
senior reporter at Huffington Post where
01:20
he covers Congress the White House and
01:22
economic policy tonight he will be
01:24
discussing his book the price of peace
01:26
money democracy and the life of John
01:29
Maynard Keynes so without any further
01:31
ado you know Zachary and Stephanie hi
01:36
everybody
01:36
it's really nice to be with you I want
01:39
to start by talking to Stephanie about
01:41
her book which is called the deficit
01:43
myth Stephanie all I hear about when I
01:47
listen to economic commentary is this
01:49
talk about debt and deficits there was a
01:52
tweet from the Lincoln project this new
01:54
group of a sort of anti-trump
01:56
Republicans talking about how Donald
01:58
Trump had run up seventeen point eight
02:00
trillion dollars of national debt there
02:02
are always columns running in The
02:04
Washington Post and The Wall Street
02:05
Journal The New York Times about debt
02:07
debt debt but your book calls the
02:09
deficit he talks about as a myth what do
02:12
you mean by the deficit myth and why do
02:15
you feel that this book wasn't
02:17
according to right at this point in time
02:19
well thank you and thanks to politics
02:22
and prose for having both of us here to
02:25
spend some time talking about our new
02:26
projects it's really pleasure to be with
02:29
you so first let me start by saying that
02:33
increasing the deficit and adding to the
02:36
national debt is probably the least bad
02:38
thing that Donald Trump has done I think
02:41
we should just get that out there look I
02:45
understand that that we are inundated
02:48
from you know the media mainstream press
02:53
politicians everybody who talks about
02:56
deficits in debt virtually everybody
02:59
talks about it in a negative way right
03:02
when we hear people bring up the deficit
03:05
it is almost always the case that
03:07
they're there they are there to complain
03:10
about the thing or the national debt
03:12
these are presented to us as as problems
03:16
at a at a minimum and as a national
03:20
security threat or a threat to future
03:22
generations I mean a real danger to us
03:25
individually your share of the national
03:28
debt borrowing from China all of these
03:31
things that create a lot of anxiety on
03:34
the part of the American people so when
03:37
you say you know why did you write this
03:39
book I think that you know my my hope is
03:43
that I can reduce the level of anxiety I
03:45
mean I start in Chapter one of the book
03:48
telling a story about you know being a
03:51
child and watching the television show
03:53
Sesame Street and you know Sesame Street
03:56
was really good at teaching us to sort
03:58
of separate things into categories these
04:00
things are similar these things are
04:02
unlike the rest of them and you know as
04:05
a kid my sister and I would watch and we
04:07
would play along as the images came on
04:10
the screen and they put up you know a
04:12
bicycle and an automobile and a train
04:15
and a tennis shoe they say you know one
04:18
of these things is not like the other
04:19
eye so we would haul her back at the
04:21
television the shoe the shoe is not like
04:23
the others you know and so I in the book
04:27
I say that I'm an adult now
04:29
I'm still hollering back at the
04:31
television all the time because I turn
04:33
on the TV and I hear you know often you
04:37
know so-called experts on economics
04:39
talking about the deficit or the debt in
04:42
ways that I think are just fundamentally
04:44
wrong and that they are getting some big
04:48
things wrong and I'm hollering back at
04:49
the TV so the reason I wrote the book I
04:52
think is to try to get us to a better
04:55
place to a better understanding where we
04:57
can have a more meaningful and fruitful
05:00
discussion about deficits in the
05:03
national debt and government finances
05:05
that ultimately I hope will get us to a
05:08
place where we make better public policy
05:10
so a really common criticism than you
05:13
hear from people who talk about modern
05:15
monetary theory or stephanie kelton is
05:17
that is that you believe that deficits
05:20
don't matter they're irrelevant this
05:22
just came out in a you know there was a
05:23
relatively nasty review in The Wall
05:25
Street Journal where somebody accused
05:26
you of this do you believe that deficits
05:29
don't matter what what what do you make
05:30
of this fatigue so you know it's funny
05:34
because if you go to the webpage that I
05:37
created to talk about the book it
05:39
literally reads Dick Cheney says
05:42
deficits don't Reagan prove deficits
05:44
don't matter he was wrong so there I am
05:47
right saying I disagree with Cheney's
05:50
characterization that deficits don't
05:52
matter my argument in the book and
05:54
throughout my work is really that
05:57
deficits matter but not the way in which
05:59
we've been taught to believe that they
06:02
matter so we've been taught as I said
06:05
earlier that that they're inherently
06:07
dangerous undesirable that you're
06:10
there's something that you do in times
06:12
of crisis because you have no choice
06:14
like now but that in more normal times
06:18
deficits are something we ought to be
06:20
avoiding governments should not spend
06:22
more than they take in in the form of
06:24
taxes they should strive to balance
06:26
budgets and avoid increasing the debt
06:30
and so I walk through in the book a
06:32
variety of ways in which deficits matter
06:34
and one important way is every deficit
06:38
is good for someone I mean that is the
06:40
reality and so when you see the reap
06:43
publicans passing these huge tax cuts at
06:46
the end of 2017
06:48
these were massive tax cuts that
06:50
Republicans passed knowing that they
06:53
would massively increase deficits so if
06:55
Republicans really believe that deficits
06:58
were inherently dangerous and that they
07:00
were gonna wreak havoc and all these bad
07:02
things were gonna happen in future
07:03
grandchildren they wouldn't do that the
07:06
reality is that the Republicans
07:08
understand I think perfectly well that
07:11
every deficit is good for someone and so
07:13
what they did was to massively cut taxes
07:17
on corporations and the wealthiest
07:19
people in this country 83% of the
07:21
benefits went to people in the top 1% of
07:24
the income distribution in other words
07:26
those who least needed the help
07:27
but the deficits that the government ran
07:31
and are running become financial
07:34
surpluses
07:35
in somebody else's pocket their deficits
07:38
become our surpluses their red ink is
07:42
our black ink the question is who's our
07:44
right who's benefiting from that
07:46
financial windfall Republicans are happy
07:48
to run deficits because they know that
07:51
they create a financial surplus that
07:53
they can direct into the hands of the
07:57
people that they're most interested in
07:58
helping and what I I would hope is that
08:01
Democrats would reach the point where
08:03
they to understand that deficits aren't
08:06
something we should be striving to
08:08
wrestle down and reduce but that the
08:11
deficit can be used as a tool to carry
08:14
out an agenda that serves the broader
08:18
public that benefits people who are
08:20
truly hurting and so that's a lot of
08:23
what I talk about in the book it feels
08:25
to me like when I when I read your work
08:26
whether it's in this book or blog posts
08:29
op-eds that you've written over the
08:30
years interviews that you've done there
08:32
is a real emphasis on on economic
08:35
distribution whether it's the
08:37
distribution of actual resources how you
08:39
how you move supply chains from point A
08:41
to point B or what kind of society you
08:44
want to live in in terms of particularly
08:46
economic inequality and the focus seems
08:49
to be on on a sort of social vision more
08:53
so than a I
08:56
don't want to I don't want to say you're
08:57
not an economist here but but the the
08:59
way the traditional economists focus on
09:02
on debt and deficits is sort of the
09:03
primary way of understanding the economy
09:05
you seem to have to my mind at least a
09:08
sort of broader social vision there
09:10
first of all is that an accurate
09:12
description of of the way you think
09:14
about your own work and second what do
09:17
you think it says about the economics
09:20
profession that we have this focus on on
09:22
debt and deficits instead of these other
09:25
these other social priorities yeah it's
09:28
a you know in the in the book chapter 7
09:31
is called the deficits that matter and
09:33
so that's exactly what I'm trying to do
09:35
to redirect our obsession with deficits
09:40
to the very real deficits that surround
09:43
us in our everyday lives and that are
09:46
crushing in many ways for millions and
09:49
millions of people in this country so
09:50
you are right that for me I look at the
09:55
federal budget as a world document and
09:58
the federal government there are our
10:00
elected officials and they get to write
10:02
and pass a budget that determines where
10:05
financial resources will be dedicated
10:08
and to what ends and in my view anyway
10:11
our elected officials are there to act
10:14
in the interest of the broad majority I
10:16
mean the people of this country right
10:18
and if the people of this country
10:20
indicate that they want you know
10:23
everybody to have health care for
10:25
example then I think that Congress
10:28
should be looking for ways to budget our
10:30
nation's real resources so that we can
10:33
deliver those that material well-being
10:35
to people so MMT is about saying listen
10:39
the easiest part of any agenda is
10:43
finding the money that's the easiest
10:44
part the challenge is how many of our
10:48
nation's real productive resources how
10:50
many of our workers how many people how
10:52
many how much of our factories how many
10:55
machines how much real resources do we
10:58
want directed to producing public goods
11:01
health care education infrastructure
11:05
I know those sorts of things and how
11:07
much do we want to leave to the private
11:09
sector and so
11:10
there is a balance there and when I talk
11:14
about addressing the deficits that
11:16
matter whether its climate or retirement
11:18
security or you know education student
11:22
loan debt health care all of that is in
11:24
that chapter that I talk about I am I'm
11:27
I'm focusing in ways that are maybe not
11:31
common among economists to think about
11:34
directing real resources to solve real
11:38
problems in our economy I have to say
11:41
that that focus reminds me quite a bit
11:44
of a fellow who I've spent a great deal
11:46
of time studying I don't know if you've
11:48
heard of him Stephanie his his name is
11:50
John Maynard Keynes are you familiar
11:52
with his work am i familiar with his
11:56
work that guy yeah it's a famous
12:08
political cartoon on that on that mug of
12:11
Keynes looking kind of like a spider in
12:13
the chair I think frankly a very lanky
12:16
yeah you know I one of the things I
12:19
loved about studying Keynes is that he
12:22
is he's one of these kind of broad broad
12:25
thinkers he's he's he's kind of an
12:29
economist by accident I think I I feel
12:32
like he you know his life is is one
12:36
where he's he's constantly surrounded by
12:38
all these philosophers and artists and
12:40
these great writers like Virginia Woolf
12:42
and Lytton Strachey and Ian Forester who
12:45
you know you know all the Merchant Ivory
12:46
you know sweepy melodramas from the 80s
12:49
at 90s he would get you know early
12:52
drafts of ianforster books before before
12:54
they came out and he forced would be
12:56
like don't tell anybody but but let me
12:58
know what you think Maynard and he was
13:00
concerned with art and letters and ideas
13:02
and and this sort of big grand vision of
13:05
society and he kind of just realized
13:07
that economics was the the science that
13:11
he could he could pursue that would give
13:14
his ideas sort of access to power and I
13:17
I feel like when I read his work you
13:21
know his very technical economic work
13:23
like like the gender
13:24
theory is often extremely dense and kind
13:27
of like it's kind of like eating a
13:29
pretzel covered in thorns it's just like
13:31
very nasty and at times but but a lot of
13:33
his other work his essays his letters
13:36
they're very very clear he has the
13:38
ability to distill these big complex
13:41
ideas into into you know fragments that
13:46
ordinary people can understand because I
13:47
think he's he's fundamentally concerned
13:50
with ordinary people and what they can
13:53
understand because he believes the
13:54
economy is not this sort of like weird
13:56
thing that has to be hived off away from
13:58
social policy he believes it's it's a
14:01
way to address the social policy that he
14:03
cares about he's concerned with war and
14:05
peace and authoritarianism and democracy
14:07
and all the big problems of the early
14:09
20th century and when I read that stuff
14:13
III have to say I feel like the the
14:15
economics profession today doesn't seem
14:19
to be working at the same level of
14:21
ambition for the most part there are
14:24
exceptions clearly and there are a lot
14:26
of very good economists out there but
14:28
the idea that you would you would sit
14:30
down within it I feel like economists
14:32
are there to tell us no that we can't do
14:34
the things that we want to do we can't
14:37
solve the problems that we need to solve
14:39
and so my question for you Stephanie
14:42
here is what are the big problems that
14:45
economists need to solve today if it's
14:48
not debt and deficits what what should
14:51
the great minds from academia be
14:54
focusing their attention on if it's not
14:57
debt and deficits well I think in a
15:01
moment it seems to me that the obvious
15:04
answer is unemployment and this is of
15:08
course the big problem that Keynes
15:10
wrestled with in the general theory
15:11
because the economy was in the grips of
15:15
a Great Depression and so here we find
15:17
ourselves yet again with you know tens
15:21
of millions of people who have lost jobs
15:23
in the course of the shortest span of
15:26
this magnitude of job losses in our
15:28
nation's history so we got to figure
15:30
that out I think that probably right now
15:33
there's no higher calling than to deal
15:36
with unemployment but
15:37
you know you you know this you you and I
15:40
know a lot of these people there are
15:41
economists all over the country down I
15:45
you and I might agree that there aren't
15:46
enough but there are economists that are
15:49
also engaging in the climate space not
15:52
necessarily as experts on climate
15:54
science but there are environmental
15:56
economists who are working in
15:58
collaboration you mentioned Keynes you
16:00
know working alongside philosophers and
16:03
people with areas of expertise outside
16:06
his own and I think those collaborative
16:08
efforts are really important whether it
16:11
comes to health care or education there
16:13
are things that economists can do and
16:15
ways in which we can be useful but we I
16:19
think need to sometimes show some
16:22
humility and recognize that scholars in
16:24
other fields also bring an awful lot to
16:27
the table and to the extent that we
16:29
could work better together and I make
16:31
economists or sometimes not very good at
16:33
this we think that our discipline sits
16:35
higher in the in the pyramid in
16:38
hierarchy than a lot of other
16:40
disciplines and so you know unemployment
16:44
healthcare the environment I mean the
16:47
list of problems as I said I did a
16:48
chapter in the book on this but I want
16:51
to talk about your book wonderful people
16:59
who are here what made you want to study
17:03
this man who I think is a fascinating
17:06
figure but what was it about him that
17:08
made you want to study and spend years I
17:12
presume studying his his life so I
17:15
didn't come at Cain's from traditional
17:19
economics background I don't have a PhD
17:20
I don't know the masters I studied
17:22
philosophy as an undergraduate but in
17:24
2006 the job I sort of fell into after I
17:27
graduated from college was a job as a
17:30
financial journalist and I was living in
17:31
central Virginia working for a trade
17:33
publication that's now part of S&P
17:35
global but I wasn't terribly thrilled to
17:39
be covering banking as a 22 year old it
17:41
just didn't seem like you know the most
17:43
exciting job in the world but then the
17:46
banking sector did me a huge favor
17:47
and exploded and it became very very
17:50
excite
17:51
to cover the banking sector and and
17:53
there was this very clear shift that
17:56
happened over the course of 2007 and
17:59
2008 where everybody who I talked to in
18:01
the markets was like oh look we got we
18:03
all we all agree the markets irrational
18:05
we all agree that supply and demand to
18:07
find automatically find a prosperous
18:09
equilibrium we all know that that the
18:11
thing things are gonna work out if the
18:13
government just stays out of the way and
18:15
they move very quickly to saying oh well
18:17
obviously the government needs to
18:19
intervene immediately to rescue the
18:22
financial sector otherwise the economy
18:25
is going to collapse in society is going
18:26
to fall into disrepair
18:27
and and when that shift happened I mean
18:30
people were very open with me at least
18:32
financial market participants we're very
18:34
open with me about the fact that they
18:36
were changing their minds I don't want
18:38
to accuse these people of hypocrisy but
18:41
but all of a sudden they were talking
18:42
about this guy John Maynard Keynes and
18:45
saying his ideas were irrelevant and
18:48
they were they were key in a way where
18:50
previously he had been sort of kind of
18:53
dismissed to the academic margins if you
18:55
were a Keynesian specialist as an
18:57
economist you know I guess you could
18:59
have like Paul Krugman had a job at the
19:01
New York Times but academically it
19:02
wasn't taken super seriously you had to
19:05
work for a particularly you know
19:07
specialist Keynesian institution if you
19:09
were an academic and and then the
19:11
markets people just didn't really talk
19:13
about it like it was a real thing and
19:15
suddenly it was just totally legitimate
19:17
and I thought that was incredible I
19:20
thought that shift was remarkable not
19:21
only because people had changed their
19:24
tune but because the the possibilities
19:27
that were available in terms of
19:29
policymaking just seemed incredibly
19:30
broad and the specific policies that we
19:33
pursued in 2008 where we can basically
19:36
bailed out the financial sector and let
19:38
everybody else kind of twist in the wind
19:39
that struck me is a not terribly great
19:43
way to go about rescuing an economy and
19:46
it struck me as odd that a fellow who
19:48
was this famous would would prescribe
19:50
something like that so I went and
19:52
started reading Keynes and I tried to
19:53
read the general theory and like I said
19:56
the general theory is that it's a real
19:57
nasty piece of work like if you wanna if
20:00
you want to give yourself a big headache
20:01
go just open the general theory and
20:04
start on pay
20:04
one and try to get through it it's it's
20:06
a brilliant book it's one of the great
20:08
great triumphs of Western Letters but it
20:11
is also it's like reading you know
20:13
Nietzsche or Heidegger or something
20:14
where you have to slog through dozens of
20:16
pages of just nasty crazy nonsense until
20:19
you get to that one gem where suddenly
20:21
you know that the sees part and the
20:23
skies open and you're like oh my
20:24
goodness this man is brilliant but I
20:26
went and read the economic consequences
20:29
of the peace which is his critique of
20:30
the Treaty of Versailles the the treaty
20:33
that ends World War one in 1919 and this
20:36
is a much clearer document it's much
20:38
easier to understand economically it's
20:40
not nearly as sophisticated as what made
20:42
makes him famous I think today as an
20:45
economist but the moral and
20:47
philosophical force of the document and
20:49
the political ideas that are involved I
20:51
think are just as urgent as everything
20:54
in the general theory and as as really
20:56
any piece of political writing I've ever
20:58
encountered in that book just it just
21:01
kind of lit a fire under man this guy is
21:03
onto something really serious it's a
21:05
book about political accountability he
21:07
says essentially the leaders who have
21:09
organized this peace treaty have saddled
21:13
every country with insurmountable debts
21:15
whether it's the war debts for the
21:16
Allies as you know that they've assumed
21:18
over the course of the war or the
21:20
reparations duties that have been it
21:22
that have been assessed on Germany that
21:24
you know who lost World War one
21:25
obviously and as a result people are
21:28
going to be shipping money across
21:29
different borders and they're not going
21:31
to have the funds available to mobilize
21:33
those real resources that are going to
21:35
make their economies recover and and
21:38
generate prosperity and that the really
21:41
I think brilliant point is that that's
21:43
not just going to be an economic problem
21:45
people are going to going to blame
21:47
outsiders for the fact that they're not
21:50
recovering and they're not going to be
21:51
totally wrong because they will be
21:53
shipping capital abroad that could be
21:55
spent at home and and that's going to
21:58
fuel international resentment it's going
22:00
to lead to dictatorship and war and I
22:02
thought that connection between economic
22:04
dysfunction and social crisis was
22:07
something that I just had not you know I
22:10
felt this sense of unfairness over the
22:13
bailouts in 2008 but I didn't feel like
22:16
they were economists who were put
22:18
together saying like okay well the
22:20
reason these numbers appear to add up on
22:22
paper but actually result in socially
22:25
terrible results that just didn't feel
22:29
like that was something that was coming
22:30
coming down from on high from people
22:32
whether they're Republicans or Democrats
22:34
in positions of economic expertise and
22:37
Keynes in in his work I felt like this
22:40
deep deep moral force and and also this
22:44
this concern for for things that were
22:46
not really about dollars and cents like
22:48
he he was concerned about the equations
22:51
balancing but he was really just afraid
22:52
of dictatorship and war he was focused
22:54
on that big kind of social problem it's
22:58
you know not the pot of gold at the end
23:00
of the rainbow it's like it's like the
23:01
march of fascism at the end of the
23:02
rainbow but he was he was afraid of
23:05
something bad happening to society and
23:08
to commute into his community not of of
23:11
you know an equation that failed to
23:14
balance appropriately and and so I just
23:18
became completely obsessed with a guy
23:20
and I was a philosophy student so I
23:22
found a lot of his ideas it was very
23:25
easy to understand him as a philosopher
23:27
more so than as a you know it economy
23:30
trician he was not he was not somebody
23:33
who cared deeply about mathematics even
23:36
though he studied mathematics as an
23:38
undergraduate when he was when he was at
23:41
Cambridge so he doesn't even have a
23:42
degree in mathematics he's what in
23:44
economics he's one of the greatest
23:45
economists who's ever lived in his
23:47
Greece in mathematics not not economics
23:49
because he's he's kind of early to the
23:51
profession it's something that's just
23:52
kind of being born when he's studying as
23:55
an undergraduate so I wrote this book
23:58
because of the crash of 2008 and my
24:00
feeling of confusion about where the
24:02
world was going and my feeling of deep
24:04
kind of moral despair and I felt like
24:06
Keynes was somebody who could speak to
24:08
that sense of of uncertainty and and of
24:13
unfairness frankly that was that was in
24:15
the air at the time I feel like you know
24:19
you must feel almost in a sense like you
24:21
know him like you're so inside his head
24:24
that and you and you come to this in the
24:27
moment right on the you know precipice
24:31
of the
24:31
natural crisis and the meltdown global
24:34
economic meltdown and you talk about you
24:36
know the Treaty of Versailles and the
24:39
reparations that were imposed on Germany
24:42
and how Keynes could foresee the kinds
24:45
of the rise of fascism and the social
24:47
unrest and all of that how did it feel
24:49
working on this project and looking at
24:52
what was happening in Europe where you
24:55
know the Greek debt crisis not just
24:56
Greece but the countries didn't not feel
24:59
like you were living the moment oh it's
25:02
terrifying I remember being so I went to
25:05
Cambridge to go through his papers at
25:08
King's College at Cambridge University
25:09
in the spring of 2017 and and this was
25:14
past the like worst days of of the Greek
25:17
debt crisis but every single week you
25:20
would see headlines about about you know
25:22
Golden Dawn and these these horrible
25:25
like far-right fascist parties that were
25:28
rising up in Greece and other other
25:30
countries it wasn't just like these
25:32
fringe parties the conservative parties
25:34
were sort of also sort of subsuming
25:37
these these fringe parties and because
25:40
making it part of their they're kind of
25:42
like more mainstream conservative the
25:45
you know policy agenda and and it was it
25:49
was deeply frightening you you would
25:51
just go through his papers and you'd be
25:52
like I'm really really worried that
25:54
Germany is gonna go fascist pretty soon
25:56
I'm really really worried that Italy's
25:57
gonna go fascist pretty soon and boom
26:00
they would do it you know you just keep
26:01
turning the pages through the documents
26:03
he's like oh Mussolini has taken power
26:05
in Rome I'm sad and the the idea that
26:10
there was an economic connection between
26:12
these things to Keynes was just obvious
26:14
it was common sense I feel like you kind
26:16
of have to argue that now in the United
26:18
States in this weird way politically
26:20
that that there's a connection between
26:23
economic policy and social disruption
26:25
this way which I don't I don't think you
26:27
actually have to do in Europe in Europe
26:29
people just kind of accept this they
26:31
might deny whether or not their
26:33
particular policymaking is responsible
26:35
from further rise of fascism but the
26:38
idea that these things are connected is
26:40
is just common sense over there so in a
26:42
certain sense it was it was nice being
26:44
around a
26:45
people who I think sort of saw this
26:47
connection between economic and social
26:49
policy the way I did certainly being in
26:51
DC you would just talk to people on the
26:53
hill in the bi oh well you know all we
26:55
care about is growth and so long as that
26:58
so long as we have growth everything's
26:59
fine and you kind of like I okay
27:03
but you know there are these people in
27:05
the industrial Midwest who like don't
27:07
have jobs and their communities are
27:08
rotting like are you you're not worried
27:10
about that like no because of all the
27:12
growth you just like what what much why
27:16
would you look at these metrics this way
27:18
and I felt like I don't know there are
27:20
some things with Keynes when you go
27:22
through his letters he just has this
27:25
incredible capacity to communicate to
27:28
other people and and he you could I
27:31
don't want to say that he felt the way I
27:32
felt looking at these things but I felt
27:34
a real sense of there was a real
27:37
resonance with a lot of his letters when
27:39
he's talking about coal miners going on
27:41
strike in 1926 and saying we're not
27:43
gonna work for this terrible wage
27:44
anymore you want to sit you want us to
27:45
eat at ten or twelve percent pay cut you
27:47
know you know buzz off and in Keynes
27:51
being like what are the oh my god
27:52
they're gonna there's gonna be a huge
27:53
strike the country is gonna go into
27:55
revolt and of course the country did go
27:57
and revolt in 1926 they have this huge
28:00
general strike in Britain and it's this
28:02
enormous moment of upheaval where all of
28:04
the labor unions just refuse to go to
28:06
work because of the conditions that are
28:08
being demanded from the government and I
28:10
you know in a sense I feel like we're
28:12
seeing some of that today I you know
28:15
obviously George Floyd's killing is the
28:19
the spark for all the unrest around the
28:22
country in the United States right now
28:24
but I think there underlying that is
28:27
there's this deep sense of unfairness
28:29
that that everything not just the police
28:33
but everything in life is slated against
28:36
working people whatever color they are
28:38
but particularly black and brown people
28:39
and that and that there's there's no way
28:42
to guarantee yourself that you know that
28:46
that tomorrow is going to be better than
28:48
today that that the political system has
28:51
abandoned not just a not just a few
28:54
people the margins but most of the
28:56
country really and I think that
28:59
that sort of sense of that crisis is
29:01
something that Keynes was concerned with
29:03
it it always it just makes his writing
29:05
come alive in a way that most you know
29:08
when I read an economics journal like
29:09
you know I've read plenty of academic
29:11
economic material it doesn't have the
29:14
same sort of fire behind it when you
29:18
know you think about canes and Keynesian
29:20
economics people I think think that
29:22
oftentimes what I gather is that people
29:25
think that Keynesian economics means
29:28
that government is supposed to prime the
29:31
pump you know just kind of grease the
29:33
wheels when the economy slows down you
29:36
you do a little bit of fiscal stimulus
29:37
you increase government spending a bit
29:40
and then you can safely take your hands
29:42
off and the economy will find its way
29:45
back to an equilibrium path and there's
29:48
no need for sustained presence on the
29:51
part of the federal government so
29:53
looking at where we are today and
29:55
recognizing that the risks are continued
29:59
social unrest and you know opportunities
30:02
for people who might want to take
30:04
advantage of those anxieties and that
30:06
unrest you know take us a note in a
30:11
fascist direction what do you think if
30:14
we could have Keynes in this chat box
30:16
with us you know would he say do
30:20
something to safeguard the American
30:23
people
30:24
you got to provide jobs for everyone you
30:26
have to safeguard health care you have
30:28
to provide education would he embrace do
30:30
you think an FDR style New Deal program
30:34
for the 21st century you know I think he
30:37
would be I think he would approve of
30:40
your work Stephanie but I think he'd be
30:42
very frustrated by the fact that it's
30:44
necessary I think he would he would say
30:46
you know look we know that these
30:49
technical questions about money and
30:51
numbers are just technical questions
30:53
about money in numbers we have a climate
30:56
crisis that's approaching us we have
30:58
this huge breakdown in international
31:00
relations between the United States and
31:01
China the European Union is
31:03
disintegrating and we know what's
31:05
happened in the past when the European
31:06
states have gone and have not gotten
31:09
along it has not been good for the rest
31:10
of the world and we have deep inequality
31:13
and just about unit in every country
31:15
however you know whatever stage of
31:18
development we want to describe them as
31:20
being and we have deep inequality within
31:22
each country and then also between
31:23
countries so he would I think be talking
31:26
about he would be trying to devise some
31:28
grand plan that could be used to kill
31:32
many of these birds at once there with
31:35
you know with with one stone I mean I he
31:37
really liked birds so I don't think
31:39
he'll be trying to kill birds with
31:40
stones one of his big complaints about
31:42
America was that there were not enough
31:43
birds in the countryside here he felt
31:45
like the English countryside had had far
31:47
more birds so it's really a much nicer
31:48
place but he when what he would want to
31:51
try to do more than one thing with his
31:54
economic policy he wouldn't just want to
31:55
cure unemployment he would want to also
31:57
solve the climate crisis he would want
31:59
to fix the relationship between the
32:01
United States and China and then he'd
32:03
probably ask a probably a separate
32:04
agenda for Europe frankly it's just you
32:06
know it's this so only so much you can
32:08
do with one policy but it'd be a very
32:10
grand plan and it's not the sort of
32:12
thing that you can do by just asking you
32:14
know JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley
32:16
to you know to you know lower some
32:19
interest rates on some loans it's it's
32:22
not something that can be done without
32:24
coordination somewhere so he would look
32:28
to the state I think as the body that
32:30
could coordinate this type of action
32:32
what he would prescribe you know I find
32:36
it hard to predict frankly like he is
32:38
somebody who is always changing his mind
32:41
it he was not ashamed to change his mind
32:43
one of the things I admire most about
32:45
him really you know he got all sorts of
32:47
stuff wrong he's deeply politically
32:49
naive you know in a lot of ways I think
32:51
is just too conservative and just
32:53
misunderstands the way the world works
32:55
but he is ok with admitting when he's
32:59
wrong and in changing course it's hard
33:03
for me to imagine it I think he was
33:07
probably smarter than I am and may may
33:10
be able to come up with with big plans
33:12
that I have not I have not seen but I do
33:14
think he'd be looking at people who were
33:17
rolling out proposals like the green New
33:19
Deal and saying that's the kind of
33:21
thinking we should be we should be
33:24
working with
33:24
we should not be working with these sort
33:26
of tax incentives to encourage certain
33:29
types of private and private behavior he
33:32
would say look we have we have crises
33:33
that have to be managed so let's go
33:35
ahead and let's go ahead and manage them
33:36
and then he would not have been a nudge
33:41
guy I mean I do not want I know in a rip
33:45
cass sunstein because he he tweeted out
33:47
something nice about my book so cass you
33:49
know appreciate it
33:51
but no i don't think so i think i think
33:53
keynes it depends on which cans you know
33:55
cuz he he is he's he changes his mind
33:57
like i said over the course of his
33:59
career but certainly by the end of his
34:00
life you know kings losses almost every
34:04
single political battle that he engages
34:06
in between 1919 and 1941 when he starts
34:09
winning it's when the Labour Party is in
34:12
power in Britain and they're the
34:13
socialist labor power late Labour Party
34:15
very very explicitly socialist in an era
34:18
when being socialist was a much more
34:20
like dangerous thing than it is today
34:22
and the thing that he his first real
34:25
policy victory is serving as the
34:27
financial kind of technician for the
34:30
British National Health Service so he
34:31
socializes British medicine and in is
34:35
not a minor player in that he is one of
34:37
the main guys who gets the British
34:39
National Health and Health Service
34:40
enacted and he's doing this when
34:43
Britain's basically broke and in World
34:45
War World War two when when you know the
34:48
Blitz has devastated Britain and they've
34:50
had they've lost so buddy thousands of
34:52
lives in in the war so you know he's
34:55
somebody who's capable of thinking very
34:56
very big even even with your back up
35:00
against the wall and I certainly think
35:03
he would be if he could if he can social
35:06
his British medicine in 1943 I'd
35:08
certainly think the new the green New
35:10
Deal would seem like a pre you know that
35:12
in a lot of ways I feel like Cannes
35:16
Cannes would have been mortified by the
35:18
the rhetoric of the Bernie Sanders
35:20
campaign not not to bust up your old
35:22
boss or maybe it's your current boss I
35:24
don't know but the talk about revolution
35:27
would have made Cannes very very
35:28
uncomfortable but in in certain respects
35:30
I think he he would have said you know
35:33
the the policy agenda that that Sanders
35:36
is pursuing is
35:38
if anything maybe a little too timid you
35:39
know you have to think big these these
35:41
crises are very real and they're bearing
35:44
down upon society right now and we are
35:45
seeing the effects of them in real time
35:48
so I I certainly would see him as
35:51
somebody who would be who would be
35:53
talking about the green New Deal and and
35:56
coming up with some very very complex
35:58
diplomatic solution that probably none
36:02
of his diplomatic solutions ever worked
36:03
so it probably wouldn't have worked but
36:06
some some way to try to resolve the
36:08
tensions between United States and China
36:10
let me ask you one more question and
36:12
then I know there are a lot of people
36:13
who want to jump in with with their own
36:15
questions but you know we hear people
36:18
talk about in inequality income and
36:20
wealth inequality all the time now I
36:22
mean there's this just commonplace but
36:24
Keynes opens the last chapter of the
36:28
general theory the first sentence to the
36:30
last chapter of the book reads from
36:33
memory something like the two great
36:36
flaws in our economic system are its
36:40
failure to provide for full employment
36:42
think about where we are today and its
36:44
arbitrary and unjust distribution of
36:48
income maybe he says income in wealth
36:50
you know I probably don't remember it
36:52
exactly but Keynes called out you know
36:55
then when levels of income and wealth
36:57
distribution the the degree of
36:59
inequality looks a whole lot like it
37:01
does today so I just wondered and and I
37:04
don't really recall seeing greater
37:07
treatment of that question the
37:09
inequality piece in Keynes's other work
37:12
but I haven't read it the way that you
37:14
have and I wondered whether you
37:16
discovered that he had a lot more to say
37:19
about inequality and so his other
37:21
writing yeah Keynes is deeply concerned
37:23
about economic inequality because he's
37:25
worried about societies being able to
37:27
hang together
37:28
he's worried primarily about revolution
37:30
he's he's a perky and conservative in
37:32
the sense where he doesn't want to see
37:34
the people rising up and overthrowing
37:36
the system he thinks that the disorder
37:38
and chaos that results from revolution
37:41
is not worth whatever prosperity might
37:43
come from a new system that is built so
37:45
he's always trying to to sort of do what
37:48
you can with the existing structures of
37:50
society
37:51
but if you if you go back and read the
37:53
economic consequences of the peace his
37:55
big work from from 1919 he basically
37:58
says look economic inequality is unfair
38:01
and the economic system of the Gilded
38:03
Age which basically ended at the opening
38:05
of World War one was a ripoff for
38:08
working people and and the only reason
38:10
people bought into this was because they
38:13
believed sincerely that tomorrow was
38:15
going to be better than today and once
38:17
you break that faith in the future which
38:19
the war had done it'll be impossible to
38:21
restart this engine now I think the
38:23
story that Keynes is telling there and
38:24
in 1919 is wrong I don't think it's the
38:27
case that people had this deep faith in
38:29
the future in 1908 or 1903 and thought
38:33
really if they just kept working hard
38:34
enough that tomorrow would be better
38:35
than today I think he was coming from a
38:38
particularly elite perspective but he is
38:41
clearly concerned with the idea that
38:42
escalating inequality is unsustainable
38:45
that you have to find some way to make
38:47
people feel part of the same social
38:48
project together and that moves that
38:52
idea is deeper than his economic sort of
38:55
technical policy prescriptions he's he's
38:58
much more concerned with these sort of
39:00
moral and political beliefs than he is
39:02
with whatever particular policy agenda
39:05
that he did he's concocted at any given
39:07
time to try to pursue this so you know
39:09
there there are periods in time when
39:10
he's basically like a Milton Friedman
39:12
kind of style monetarist but when that
39:15
doesn't work he just says okay well
39:16
let's do something else so I think
39:19
inequality matters to him on this moral
39:22
level that is is it is fundamental to
39:25
the way that he thinks about the world
39:27
and and and he he just does not believe
39:31
that deeply unequal societies will be
39:33
able to hang together and he says this
39:36
from the position of somebody who wants
39:37
to enjoy all the fruits of being on top
39:39
he he loves going to the Opera and art
39:42
openings and he was married to a
39:44
ballerina the most famous ballerina in
39:46
London you know he's just you know he
39:48
loves the high life but he doesn't want
39:50
to lose it and he feels like if you do
39:51
not have a more equal society if you
39:53
don't let people participate in that
39:54
high life then he won't get to enjoy it
39:56
either because people will revolt yeah
39:58
and you said you said a more equal and
40:00
that's another thing that he points out
40:01
in that last chapter he's not talking
40:03
about an egalitarian district
40:05
of income and wealth in fact he says you
40:07
know we just have too much inequality
40:09
and so what we need to do is you know
40:11
rein it in but he he goes out of his way
40:14
to make the argument that certain amount
40:16
of inequality in his view actually does
40:19
serve some useful purpose in terms of
40:22
you know incentivizing people and
40:24
innovation and that sort of thing right
40:26
yeah and Stephanie I want to ask you
40:28
this question about your work cuz I I
40:30
feel like there are times when the focus
40:34
on mmt is understandably about deficits
40:37
and debt but in a lot of ways I think
40:40
the sort of more radical implications of
40:42
your work seem to me and correct me if
40:45
I'm wrong to suggest that we can focus
40:47
more on these questions of distribution
40:49
than we do on on questions of say growth
40:52
which is what economists typically are
40:54
saying you know so long as we grow the
40:55
pie everybody's better off
40:57
it might am I wrong about that if I
41:00
misread you in some way no do you mean
41:03
questions of distribution just with
41:06
respect to income and wealth with
41:08
inequality right right any part yeah so
41:11
one of the things that mmm tears have
41:14
always pointed out with respect to what
41:17
is the role of taxes in the economy
41:19
we've been taught to believe that taxes
41:21
are primarily useful because they're the
41:25
source of revenue to the federal
41:26
government's how the government pays the
41:27
bills and mmt rejects that and says no
41:30
taxes are important for a lot of reasons
41:32
but that ain't one of them and one of
41:35
the reasons that taxes are important is
41:37
because it does give the government
41:38
gives Congress a lever to pull to
41:44
realign the distribution of wealth and
41:46
income if they want to make adjustments
41:48
to the tax code not because they need to
41:51
peel a few bucks off of a billionaire
41:54
here and a billionaire there to fund
41:56
education or do some infrastructure
41:58
investment but because they genuinely
42:00
want to tackle the problem of extreme
42:03
concentrations of wealth and income
42:05
inequality in this country then it's
42:08
perfectly legitimate to set forth with
42:12
an ambitious agenda to adjust taxes on
42:15
the very wealthy for no other reason
42:18
- then to realign the balance of
42:20
distribution I think in a lot of ways
42:23
Zack we don't go far enough because we
42:25
look at the very wealthy as a pay-for
42:29
and lawmakers say well we want to you
42:32
know do infrastructure we want to put
42:34
some more money in education we want to
42:36
improve lives for the broad majority of
42:38
people but we feel like we have to pay
42:40
for it somehow so we got to get money
42:41
and we get money by raising revenue and
42:44
we don't want to hurt the people in the
42:46
middle and the people at the bottom so
42:48
we're gonna concentrate all the pain at
42:50
the very top that's where the taxes will
42:52
fall the problem from my perspective is
42:55
while that might be perfectly legitimate
42:58
to try to pass a bill that says we're
43:01
gonna spend to you know increase money
43:04
for Pell grants or infrastructure or
43:06
whatever and alongside that we're gonna
43:09
increase taxes on the rich very often
43:11
what I've observed in my brief time in
43:14
the Senate and in my longer journey as
43:17
just an observer of you know the
43:19
political process is that even Democrats
43:22
are very reluctant to increase taxes on
43:26
people at the top there's this notion
43:28
that it's punishing success in some way
43:31
and you know the job creators will be
43:33
heard and we you know so what happens is
43:35
we pair that you know desire to spend
43:39
more on education or whatever with a
43:41
need to raise taxes so that we don't end
43:44
up adding to the deficit and that forces
43:47
lawmakers to pick two fights and you
43:49
don't just have to pick two fights you
43:50
have to win two fights you have to
43:52
convince enough of your colleagues to
43:54
vote for the increased spending on
43:56
education and you have to convince them
43:58
to close the tax loopholes or you know
44:01
to introduce a wealth tax or whatever it
44:03
is and if you can't win both of those
44:05
fights you don't win on your agenda you
44:09
don't get the increased spending for
44:11
education so you know it's it's a
44:14
double-edged sword this game of trying
44:16
to play by pay-go rules to avoid adding
44:19
to the deficit but mmm tears and myself
44:23
included look at Democrats sometimes and
44:26
say you know when you approach taxes
44:27
this way you're not being nearly
44:29
ambitious
44:30
enough because you're just trying to
44:31
peel off enough to cover the cost of
44:34
whatever it is you're trying to do so in
44:36
the case of a wealth tax for example if
44:38
if the wealth tax is to take 2% from you
44:43
know people with very large fortunes and
44:45
then at the same time tell them but
44:47
don't worry you're not even gonna feel
44:48
it because your wealth is going to
44:50
accumulate at a much higher rate on an
44:52
annual basis than what's in a sense
44:55
what's the point right what's the point
44:57
if they're not going to feel it you're
44:58
not gonna address the extreme
45:01
concentrations of wealth inequality so I
45:04
do approach the tax question differently
45:07
and I think I come at it with a more
45:10
ambitious desire to see realignment and
45:14
rebalancing you know these extreme
45:16
concentrations of income and wealth
45:17
inequality aren't just bad for the way
45:19
our economy functions it's bad for the
45:20
way our democracy works so before we go
45:24
and Tom I think I think we will want to
45:26
have some questions from the audience a
45:27
second but before we do that Stephanie I
45:29
have a question for you about sort of
45:30
the the Washington legitimacy kind of
45:35
etiquette because I feel like for a long
45:38
time there are very good people on
45:40
Capitol Hill who are you know brilliant
45:42
thoughtful folks who will listen to
45:44
arguments no matter where they come from
45:45
but there are a lot of people on Capitol
45:47
Hill who are not brilliant and not
45:48
thoughtful and and they don't so much
45:51
listen to the arguments as they listen
45:52
to like the prestige that surrounds the
45:55
person who is saying them so like you
45:57
know in 1989 if Alan Greenspan had
45:59
showed up on the hill and told everybody
46:01
that actually all horses are really hand
46:03
grenades so we really have to stop
46:05
riding them because they're about to
46:06
explode people would have just said oh
46:07
man you know I really got to stop
46:10
writing all these horses and they would
46:12
have they would have believed him did
46:15
you notice a difference because you've
46:17
been talking about this stuff for a long
46:18
time did you notice a difference in the
46:20
way that you were treated by folks on
46:24
the hill after you started working for
46:25
the Senate Budget Committee did that did
46:28
that have a any sort of change in the in
46:30
the way that you're sort of ideas seem
46:33
to resonate with with staff no I don't
46:37
think they resonated with staff item I
46:39
don't feel well Zac I talked about it a
46:41
little bit in the book you know I think
46:43
there was a certain degree of surprise
46:46
when I showed up that you know they were
46:49
accustomed to dealing with deficit hawks
46:52
people who want to balance the budget
46:53
really fast get it done and get it done
46:56
quick and the deficit doves who were
46:58
sort of more apologetic and tolerant of
47:02
deficits while they also wanted to see
47:04
them balanced they were willing to go
47:05
more slowly but those are the only two
47:07
sort of birds they were accustomed to
47:11
and then I show up and you know I
47:13
cleaned that phrase years ago the
47:15
deficit owl to distinguish my own views
47:18
from these other from these other birds
47:20
and I remember that yeah you've been
47:24
you've been living there in Texas right
47:26
no I'm in Virginia but yes we have we
47:30
have this family of our but they got
47:31
back fantastic I think of the deficit al
47:35
every time I see you tweet a picture but
47:37
the quick story is that people were
47:40
taken aback
47:41
they didn't a lot of folks didn't
47:43
realize exactly what I was and that
47:47
people actually had views like I held
47:50
and I think it took some getting used to
47:52
and you know I think it over a period of
47:56
time maybe there's been they've been
47:58
taken more seriously but it I wouldn't
48:01
say that it happened in that short kind
48:04
of span of time that I was there there
48:06
was a warming up to but not not a full
48:10
embracive mm-hmm by the way I think ok
48:13
well Tom I think we're ready to field
48:16
some questions here if if you got it has
48:19
anyone asked any questions yet we have
48:23
quite a few actually we're not gonna
48:25
have a chance to get to all of them but
48:28
I will read the ones that have the most
48:30
votes so the first question with the
48:34
most votes is what if any would be the
48:37
impact of mmt on the Social Security
48:40
trust funds which consists exclusively
48:42
of special obligation Treasury bonds
48:45
like that's for you Stephanie well okay
48:49
so mmm tea per se doesn't have an impact
48:51
on Social Security but I did write a
48:54
whole chapter on anti
48:56
Dolan's and tried to make the point that
48:59
you know FDR set up social security back
49:03
in 1935 and he argued that he'd set it
49:08
up the way he did so that these are his
49:09
words so that no damn politician could
49:12
ever put his hands on my Social Security
49:14
program that was almost a direct quote
49:17
and what he did was say that everybody
49:20
was going to pay into it you were gonna
49:21
see your contribution in the form of a
49:23
payroll tax withholding you'd see the
49:25
money go in and then upon retirement you
49:28
would draw your earned benefits right
49:31
and so today we have a situation where
49:35
we continue to believe that the only way
49:37
the government can maintain its promises
49:40
to future retirees to their dependents
49:42
to the disabled is if there's enough
49:45
money available to do that so we started
49:48
as a consequence of alan greenspan and
49:50
his commission in 1983 started building
49:52
up this massive trust fund locking up
49:55
digital dollars on a spreadsheet called
49:57
a trust fund and saying well if we just
49:59
have enough spreadsheet entries and
50:01
there are enough dollars locked in place
50:04
then we can release those dollars in the
50:06
future when we need to make the benefit
50:08
payments so mmt points out the insanity
50:10
of this and the proposition that the
50:13
government needs to lock up its own
50:15
currency in digital form in order to be
50:18
able to spend its own currency in the
50:20
future and so you know what I argue in
50:23
that chapter is that there's a really
50:24
quick way I could do it with a single
50:27
sentence amendment to the Social
50:28
Security Act of 1935 I could make the
50:31
whole problem quote-unquote go away with
50:34
a one-sentence amendment to that act
50:36
it's just about granting Congress the
50:39
legal authority to make benefit payments
50:41
regardless of the balance and the trust
50:43
fund okay this next question you kind of
50:50
talked about a little bit but is it's
50:52
this person asks how do you think Keynes
50:55
would have reacted to Congress's actions
50:57
with Co good relief ie PPP loans and
51:00
such how do you think he'd approach our
51:02
current economic situation
51:05
I don't hijack this one Stephanie but I
51:07
think think this was sort of my
51:09
territory you know I think Keynes
51:12
wouldn't have been worried about the
51:13
amount of money being spent I think he
51:15
would agree with everything Stephanie is
51:17
said about debt and deficits so far but
51:19
I think he would have been deeply
51:20
troubled by the way that the money has
51:21
been spent and and about the conditions
51:24
that have been placed on that money I
51:26
think the point that Stephanie made
51:29
earlier about about Keynes believing
51:31
that the general theory of employment
51:33
interest and money sort of unlocked this
51:36
ability for the government to tackle
51:38
inequality directly as as sort of a way
51:42
to make markets work better I I think he
51:45
would have looked at this rescue and
51:46
said you know this is a lot of money for
51:48
the richest people in the country and
51:50
not a whole lot for everybody else and
51:52
and I think you know he also would have
51:54
been this is this is a more deeper
51:57
philosophical question but the question
51:59
about work versus welfare in particular
52:02
you know Keynes didn't want people to
52:04
have to work their whole lives he had
52:06
this he had this sort of utopian view of
52:09
a world which we all had 15 hour work
52:11
weeks we spent the rest of the time you
52:13
know doing art and in writing poetry I
52:16
think he would have wanted that in a
52:18
certain sense but he also understood
52:20
that people take a great deal of moral
52:23
and social satisfaction from from having
52:26
a job no matter how many a horse they're
52:28
working you might want them to not have
52:30
to work all the time but he recognized
52:32
that people like participating in their
52:34
community through their work and so the
52:37
fact that we were putting a lot of money
52:39
into expanding unemployment payments
52:42
instead of making sure that people
52:45
didn't lose their jobs I think would
52:47
have troubled him that that's like you
52:49
know I think Keynesian scholars could
52:51
could dispute me on that on that point
52:53
but more broadly he would just said look
52:56
we need to rescue the economy we have to
52:57
do something and we and we do have to
52:59
rescue the rich we do have to retic it's
53:01
not good if all these corporations just
53:03
fail but he would have said the focus
53:06
needs to be on on income support for all
53:09
of these people and I don't think the
53:11
the bill that was passed by 96 to 0
53:14
margin in the Senate
53:16
focused its priority
53:18
on on the types of things that that they
53:21
that animated canes throughout much most
53:23
of his life this next question is for
53:28
Stephanie this person wants to know if
53:32
you could walk through the mechanism
53:34
that explains why deficits do not matter
53:37
well let me reiterate first that my
53:41
position has that deficits do matter but
53:43
not the way we've been taught to believe
53:45
so they matter in a lot of ways there's
53:47
the very and important source of
53:50
corporate profits for one thing so let's
53:53
put that aside because there's a
53:55
Colette's key profit equation we don't
53:57
have time to go through that but let me
53:59
do it the quick and dirty way okay when
54:01
I say every deficit is good for someone
54:03
the deficit is the difference between
54:05
two numbers right one number is how many
54:08
dollars the government is spending into
54:10
the economy the other number is how many
54:12
dollars the government is subtracting
54:14
out of the economy by taxing us
54:16
primarily okay so that we use this term
54:20
deficit to describe the condition when
54:23
the government adds more dollars into
54:26
the economy then it subtracts we call
54:28
its deficit but what we forget is we
54:31
could just as easily call it a surplus
54:33
we're using the word deficit because
54:35
we're describing what's happening on the
54:37
government's ledger but if we were
54:39
describing what's happening on the other
54:41
ledger the outside of government part of
54:44
the economy we would call it a surplus
54:46
they spend a hundred in and only tax
54:49
ninety away from us that ten dollars
54:52
that gets deposited becomes our surplus
54:55
the real question is who got it for whom
54:58
and for what what was the government
55:00
doing was it building hospitals and
55:02
schools was it repairing infrastructure
55:05
was it paying for health care was it
55:07
dealing with climate change or did it
55:09
just become a windfall to the people who
55:12
least need the help so deficits matter a
55:14
lot right they are a financial deposit
55:17
that shows up on somebody else's bank
55:19
account the question is you know for who
55:22
and for what I think we only have time
55:27
for one more question so I'm going to
55:30
ask this one to Zack
55:32
this person would like to know a little
55:33
bit about Keynes and the Bloomsbury
55:35
group so Keynes comes of age at the turn
55:39
of the 20th century and he's hanging out
55:41
with all of these people like Virginia
55:43
Woolf and ianforster they're writers and
55:47
artists and it's a a very is certainly
55:51
given the strictures of British society
55:54
at the early 20th century it's a very
55:56
liberated group so these people are
55:58
constantly swapping lovers Keynes is
56:02
very enthusiastically gay for most of
56:03
his life until he falls in love with the
56:05
most famous ballerina in in Britain and
56:09
marries her and then they have a
56:10
wonderful marriage that lasts the rest
56:13
of his life but these people in a lot of
56:16
ways are sort of the the moral authority
56:19
in Keynes's life he's not somebody who
56:22
is looking around to Pete you know if
56:25
you if you hang out on Capitol Hill long
56:26
enough which I think both Stephanie and
56:27
I have done you know for better force
56:30
quite a bit people on Capitol Hill are
56:33
sort of looking to like what you know
56:35
what what business groups and lobbyists
56:38
are gonna think about what they do
56:39
Keynes did not he was never looking over
56:43
his shoulder to say what's Farmar gonna
56:44
say what's Wall Street gonna say he was
56:46
looking over his shoulder to say like
56:47
what's Virginia Woolf gonna think about
56:49
what I'm doing he always felt this very
56:52
intense moral pressure from these people
56:55
in his life and and that pressure
56:57
extended to the fact that he was even
56:58
working in government at all they were
57:00
like why are you wasting your time and
57:03
in this terrible you know stuff of
57:05
public administration I mean you could
57:06
be a writer you could be a poet you
57:08
could be a painter wouldn't that be a
57:09
fine thing and and of course he's he's
57:11
doing he's good at it right and it's
57:14
it's actually quite good for the world
57:15
that he's doing it because he's he's
57:17
good at it but but they're constantly
57:20
sort of riding him and saying you'll
57:22
make sure that whatever that you do is
57:25
living up to these ideals and Bloomsbury
57:28
has this in certain respects I think
57:30
very naive view of the world they think
57:33
that the power of love and art and
57:35
Letters is capable of breaking down all
57:38
these barriers between people's that
57:40
have been built up through political
57:41
systems over time so if you if you just
57:43
show people the right painting
57:45
if you read them the right novels
57:47
they'll be able to communicate across
57:48
different borders and different
57:49
languages and understand each other it's
57:52
a really beautiful vision and and
57:54
they're constantly just telling canes
57:56
like live up to that live up to that
57:58
ideal and and they're the only people in
58:01
the world who can really convince him
58:02
that he's gone astray in any moral sense
58:04
so I think canes as a as a member of the
58:07
Bloomsbury set he's kind of an odd duck
58:10
because he's the only economist in the
58:12
Bloomsbury set everybody else is an
58:13
artist or a writer but in a lot of ways
58:16
he is sort of trying to realize their
58:19
vision on the world stage it make it
58:22
make it something that is material in
58:24
concrete in in public policy and
58:27
certainly by the end of his life I think
58:29
he's quite successful with that I think
58:30
the British National Health Service is a
58:32
great example of that but you know his
58:35
his great work his first great work the
58:38
the economic consequences of the peace
58:40
is largely you know an apology to
58:42
Bloomsbury for his role in and financing
58:45
the the First World War for for Britain
58:47
he's basically telling everybody in
58:49
Bloomsbury I was wrong this war was
58:51
pointless and a lot of people died and
58:52
it was for nothing you guys were right
58:54
and I was wrong
58:56
that that dynamic is there throughout
58:58
his career and it's it's it's really
59:00
significant I think it make it's one of
59:02
the things that makes him a very unique
59:03
economist well thank you so much guys
59:07
this is a really fascinating talk I want
59:09
to remind everyone that you can purchase
59:10
the deficit myth and the price of Pete's
59:13
piece by clicking the green button at
59:14
the bottom of your screen and thank you
59:17
so much Zachary and Stephanie for being
59:19
here with us tonight
59:20
thanks everybody thanks everyone no


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