Reflections on the 2022 Levy Institute Summer Seminar on MMT, Minsky and Godley (Part 1)

[James Keenan]

In mid-June I attended the Levy Institute Summer Seminar on MMT, Minsky and Godley. This event, lasting eight intensive days, was held at Bard College in New York state's Hudson Valley and featured lecture presentations by 32 instructors (some speaking more than once).

In this post I'll only comment on who attended the Seminar and its overall format. In subsequent posts I hope to comment on the range of presentations and presenters, the content of the presentations, and what the Seminar suggests for the current state of MMT as a body of thought and basis for action. (There were at least two other members of this Google Group who attended the Seminar; I encourage them to post on their experiences at the event.)

Student Population

The approximately sixty articipants ranged in age from about twenty-one to mid-seventies with the highest concentration (by my observation) in the 25- to 35-year-old range. My estimate is that about three-quarters of the participants were men and one-quarter were women.

Nationalities

Participants came from (at least) the following countries:

• Australia
• Brazil
• Canada
• Finland
• France
• Germany
• Greece
• Hungary
• India
• Italy
• Japan
• Korea (Republic of)
• Mexico
• Nigeria
• Peru
• Sri Lanka
• United Kingdom
• United States

In the list above some participants were natives or citizens of one country but long-time residents of a second.

Languages

The largest contingent of participants came from the United States, but what was striking was that approximately ten -- one-sixth of the total -- came from Brazil. So Brazilian Portuguese was easily the second most frequently heard language at the Seminar, probably followed by Italian. All of the European participants came from countries that are (or were, pre-Brexit) members of the European Union. So it was not surprising that many of the Europeans were citizens of one country, had gone to college or graduate school in a second country and were currently working in a third country.

The English-language fluency of non-native-anglophone speakers was generally quite high. For example, there was one fellow from Greece, educated in other European countries, and currently working in Florence, Italy, who used the term epistemic in a question -- and I had to ask him what that word meant!

Event Format

According to Levy Institute director Dimitri Papadimitriou this was the eleventh such event organized by that organization. However lead event organizer Randy Wray noted that this event was the latest in a series of such "summer seminars" organized by post-Keynesian and other economists going back to the 1980s. The event consisted of eight consecutive days of lecture presentations running from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. with two coffee breaks and one lunch break -- over 50 hours of classroom time all together. (One afternoon there was a group outing, which I'll discuss later.)

About three quarters of the presentations were done in person; the balance were remote. Some remote speakers were always scheduled to present via Zoom, but others had to do so at the last minute due to illness or changes in their governments' pandemic-era travel policies. The Zoom presentations were definitely a second-best experience.

Was it really a "seminar"?

When I was in college or graduate school, a seminar was a final-semester or upper-level class in which a small number of students (usually eight to ten) met with a professor and were expected to present some work of their own for discussion and critique by the professor and fellow students. A seminar class was neither large nor lecture-focused.

By that definition this event was not a seminar. We students were attending lectures and did not have to do any presentations of our own. The closest we got to a seminar was two "breakout sessions" in which a dozen students got to go one-on-one with one instructor for ninety minutes focused on the topic of the immediately preceding lecture. I was fortunate to participate in breakout sessions led by Ndongo Samba Sylla and Randy Wray.

I would, however, describe this event as "post-bootcamp advanced training." In the militaries of the U.S. and other countries basic training of new recruits is often referred to as bootcamp, but after bootcamp personnel are usually sent for advanced training in more specialized fields. All Seminar participants had to have previous familiarity with, and demonstrated interest in, Modern Monetary Theory to be admitted. Hence, none of us were raw recruits. And as far as I could tell all participants were college graduates. But few participants, if any, had published anything like a refereed scholarly article.

To be continued.