Professor Bill Mitchell on Modern Money Theory

This article is linked to a YouTube lecture on Modern Money Theory. Professor Bill Mitchell demonstrates in simple terms how language, especially metaphor, molds our thoughts and beliefs to accept Neoliberalism as the dominant economic and political paradigm of the United States.

The advent of neoliberalism as an accepted policy can be precisely determined as January 20, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan became president. Reagan (or his friends) appointed as his advisors economics professors sympathetic to the Chicago school, so labelled because some of its key exponents held academic positions in the economics department of the University of Chicago. As the unofficial policy of Reagan and his successor presidents, it has guided economic decisions through both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Neoliberalism, for all Americans not in the top income brackets, has been a dismal failure. In spite of that failure, those who have benefitted from neoliberalism policy—the superwealthy, in other words—have had the power to suppress alternative paths that lead to a more equitable and just society.

Neoliberalism has as its theoretical underpinning the neoclassical school of economics, which was started by Alfred Marshall (1842–1924), English Economist, as a response to Henry George (1839–1897), who proposed a land value tax in place of all other taxes. Almost all economists in government and academia today subscribe to neoclassical economics. If a candidate for an academic position is critical of its validity or its ability to predict future economic events, the candidate is simply not hired. Economists who subscribe to MMT (Modern Money Theory) cannot get their work published in prestigious academic journals. The profession has worked diligently to keep them non-persons.

There are scholars who fortunately have refused to drink the Kool-Aid, and one of them is Australian Bill Mitchell. His talks on YouTube are clear and understandable expositions of how the economy really works. His Australian accent is occasionally hard for Americans to follow, especially his vowels, but it’s not difficult to translate. Listen and learn.