:seinfeld:
Is it all lib hokum? I was in my local theory shop yesterday and was looking at The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton, something I put on my reading list a year and a half ago.
Since then I've listened to and read Matt Bruenig's criticisms of MMT and found them pretty convincing but I haven't really spent much time reading the anything on the "pro" side.
Is this worth my time to read a book on MMT or is it just a distraction? Thoughts?
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Yep. Businesses do poorly when there is not enough slack in the labor market. They want a certain level of unemployment to keep the workers' condition precarious.
Not sure if neolibs call it this, but I've heard it referred to as "surplus labor". It's a combination of people looking for jobs, people who can't currently work, people doing unpaid labor (disproportionately women), retired people, etc.
They can be called in to work if needed and then dumped back into the labor pool. See: women during WW2
reserve army of labor?
I was specifically talking about more recent theory, specifically among the post-work or anti-work crowd. This book is fairly influential in that space and talks about this directly starting around page 92 of that pdf.
my bad, I didn't see that Eugene_V_Dabs had mentioned it
I agree and that's what I also see as the major flaw with MMT, though I think it could very well work if it ever were to be implemented correctly.