Week 1 Blog

Welcome back! On this week’s blog I am going to give an outlook for the future and cover some of the work I have already done. In the future, I will be doing serious reading on Modern Monetary Theory. Here is my booklist:

1. A Mitchell Innes, What is Money? 
2. Warren Mosler, Soft Currency Economics
3. Georg Friedrich Knapp, State Theory of Money 
4. Bill Mitchell, Reclaiming the State

Mosler and Mitchell are two of the preeminent scholars on Modern Monetary Theory. Mosler is credited as the so-called creator of “Modern Monetary Theory” with his invaluable early works and writings in the 1980’s. Mitchell was one of Moslers early collaborators and has been teaching MMT at the college level for decades now. Additionally, Mitchell is my advisor for this project and reading his work with his assistance will help me to gain a greater understanding of MMT. 

A Mitchell Innes and Georg Friedrich Knapp are centuries-old economists. Despite the age of their work, it is important to understand the arguments that they made about currency then and how they have been reformulated under our current understanding. Warren Mosler called Innes “What is Money?” one of the greatest things ever written on money. Innes and Knapp are fundamental to understanding MMT despite them never having lived to see its formation. 

So far on this project I have begun my work by re-reading L. Randall Wray’s “Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems”, this book is great for understanding the reasoning behind MMT. A point that Bill Mitchell emphasized during our first meeting was to understand that MMT is not a set of policy proposals rather a re-understanding of how our government interacts with money, that can then lead us to policy proposals. MMT is not a political stance, it is a comprehension of how the treasury interacts with the public. Additionally, I will meet again with professor Bill Mitchell, on April 2nd to discuss my progress. I hope to keep you all updated!