MMT Anecdata
James Keenan
Two places where I've lately run into mentions of MMT in non-MMT contexts.
First, the Levy Economic Conference, about which I've posted here twice in the last week, was not the only conference I've attended recently. On May 2 I attended a conference called Good Jobs and Inclusive Growth: The Fight for a People's Policy and New York City. This was held at the New School and was an all-day confab among liberal-to-leftist political economists, trade unionists and officials of the new New York City mayoral administration of Zohran Mamdani.
(The conference was held in the same geographical space in which I attended the New School Graduate Faculty's Political Economy program a half century ago -- but not in the same building. The building in which I spent six years was at 65 Fifth Avenue and had formerly been Lane's department store. They knocked that building down a decade or more ago and replaced it with a building addressed as 63 Fifth Avenue. I estimate that the basement auditorium in which this conference was held was roughly in the same position as the reserve desk in the library where you would go up and request a copy of the Anwar Shaikh's manuscript, "The Humbug Production Function.")
The first panel at the People's Policy conference, "The Political Economy of Fiscal Policy and the New York City Budget," was a colloquy between Adam Tooze, powerhouse historian from Columbia University and Nathan Gusdorf, head of the Mayor's Office of Management and Budget under Mamdani. The first question Tooze posed to Gusdorf was, "What is different in state and local budget and fiscal policy from the federal level policies?" Gusdorf replied that the federal government is a currency issuer; hence, its spending is not deficit-constrained. New York state and city, in contrast, are currency users; they have to balance their budgets and play by GAAP rules. Tooze -- whom I had previously seen on a panel discussion following a 2024 showing of the film Finding the Money -- then joked that they could then "go all-MMT" in the discussion but had better stay focused on the assigned topic.
Gusdorf, it turns out, had come to the Mamdani administration from leading the Fiscal Policy Institute, an Albany-based think-tank analyzing New York state government. Thirty years ago, in my final semester of my second time around in graduate school (Hunter College School of Social Work), I did a paper on why the social work profession and the profession had to pay attention to tax policy -- and my principal material from that paper came from the Fiscal Policy Institute.
Second, I just finished Cory Doctorow's Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It -- and I strongly recommend it. In the Acknowledgements, author Doctorow writes:
"I'm also keenly grateful to the heterodox economists who've welcomed me into their midst, such as Stephanie Kelton, Steve Keen, L. Randall Wray, Patricia Pino and Christian Reilly."
All MMTers! I can't point to the specific impact of MMT on this book, but, hey, let's take a compliment where we can get it!
Warren Mosler
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