Last year I read Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. I found it compelling and included it in an article I wrote about Puerto Rico (“The Spooky Nature of Debt“), mentioned it in a podcast and included it in the list of books I published in December. Apparently, this was a signal to many of you that I am, or at the very least might be, interested in a strain of economic thinking called Modern Monetary Theory.
“If you discover a magic pill that is said to solve some complex and ancient problem human societies continually struggle with, you might want to pause before taking it.”
The reality is that I’m a deep skeptic of the theory. In fact, I think we should all be reflexively skeptical of any theory that purports to remove burdensome economic constraints and make our lives instantly easier if only society can find the required cultural enlightenment. If you discover a magic pill that is said to solve some complex and ancient problem human societies continually struggle with, you might want to pause before taking it.
My skepticism aside, my goal here is not to convince the passionate supporters of endless federal money printing that this is a bad idea – you’ve got your thing and you really believe it and I don’t want to quarrel over it in this piece – but to point out to you, and especially those sympathetic to the ends if not the means of what you advocate for, that Modern Monetary Theory is not going to solve the problems we are trying to address at Strong Towns.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
