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Doug's avatar

Dougald, whenever I read one of your posts it makes me want to find you and have a coffee and talk about what you have written. I came upon MMT because I was searching for a reason why the massive money supply expansion in 2008-09 did not result in massive inflation they way I had been taught that it would in grad school.

It has now been shown quite conclusively that there is no relationship between the money supply and inflation. And the “too much money chasing too few goods” monetarist explanation is incredibly simplistic in a way that Kelton and other MMT theorists make clear. Inflation that results from supply chain issues (such as experienced in the pandemic and its aftermath) needs a fiscal policy reponse aimed at increasing supply (or potentially regulating prices or even rationing in the short term).

Increasing central bank interest rates to address inflation (however caused) works. But the way it works is cruel and almost always “overshoots” its objective. Making business investment more expensive due to a higher rate of interest kills job growth which siphons wage income out of the economy, which leads to a lower rate of inflation.

So the wage earners typically in the bottom half (or third, or quarter) of the labour market pay an exorbitant cost of the “war on inflation” while those holding assets benefit. I am not a communist but this doesn’t sound like a plan any democratic country should be pursuing on behalf of its citizens.

Dougald you have mentioned the New Deal and the changes ushered in by FDR in several posts. One of the very significant changes that occurred during WWII and was cemented through unions after the war was the 40 hour work week.

Prior to WWII the typical full time work week was 60 hours! Rifkin in The End of Work makes a convincing case that the Depression was largely caused by wage income not keeping pace in the economy with productivity gains as the US industrialized its economy. Workers simply could not afford to buy what the economy was producing and the economy ground to a halt.

Not only did the work week decline to 40 hours post-war, but incomes also rose! In effect the balance between worker productivity and earnings was “reset” and remained in step as the economy grew until about 1978/9. Policy decisions by government systematically empowered corporations in the wage setting process and in fact, inflation assists this process in that wages did not rise as fast as prices throughout the next 4 decades.

Anyway, this is turning into its own post (sorry).

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Frank van Doorn's avatar

PS. Love the works of Keynes and J. Kenneth Galbraith.

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