Future Monetary Theory
MMTâs account of the origin of money is a useful corrective to the stories told by orthodox economists. But a deeper history of the social construction of money opens up more radical possibilities for rethinking the monetary order.
The Money Changer and his Wife, Marinus van Roymerswaele, c. first half of the sixteenth century (Wikimedia Commons)
Letâs hope this time really is different. A decade ago, in the aftermath of the
previous once-in-a-lifetime economic calamity, tentative early steps toward fiscal stimulus were repulsed by an international turn toward austerity. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was famouslyreduced by noted math enthusiast Larry Summers from $1.2 trillion to $800 billion, before being watered down further to appease Senate Republicans. It was much too little, did not address the root causes of the ongoing crisis, and was offset by state-level austerity even before the nationalturn to fiscal retrenchment after 2010. The costs of austerity were even more brutal across the Atlantic, where the structures of the European Union enforced sweeping cuts in Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain. The UK opted for grinding austerity voluntarily. One study found that 30,000 excess deaths in the UK over the winter of 2015 alone could be attributed to the Conservative governmentâs reduction in health and social services. For the sake of comparison, that figure is toward the upper bound estimate of total executions during the Year of the Terror during the French Revolution. At least those people got a trial.