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Thank you 👍

Yeah, I do think we've got a plausible route through the mess we're in, so, got to keep it positive otherwise people give up. And, I've got Steve Keen on my radar. Slowly learning more about his ideas.

I'm not at all sure what you mean? In the video I said that it was widely expected that we'd see improvements in rational reasoning in the next generation of models. As far as I can see that is the main thing that GPT o1 is bringing to the table. That does not make it "full blown human level AGI". Even Sam Altman says of it, "o1 is still flawed, still limited, and it still seems more impressive on first use than it does after you spend more time with it." x.com/sama/status/1834283100639297910 Doing better than most humans at well framed answer / response tests, is not the same as having reached full blown, human level AGI.

Glad to have introduced you to him. Well worth reading. I'm not so familiar with Rebecca Giblin's work, but I intend to read / watch more of her work too.

Thanks 👍

@@Go-Meta I read every single thing I get my hands on from Cory Doctrow!

Yeah, he's good. I'm currently reading and enjoying "The Internet Con".

Again the comparaison between Murdoch buying newspapers to influence politics as just the same as Facebook cloud is failing to see how these technologies changed the so dramatically how we use media to shape public opinion, therefore failing to see how these new material condition shape the distribution of wealth, the social contract and how much influence one can have, who can have it, how efficient it is and who are the big winners of this new shift.

Of course there are big differences between Amazon and supermarkets, but Varoufakis was seeming to imply things like that Amazon picking what is put in front of the consumer is a new phenomenon, rather than being a digital enhancement of an existing phenomenon. And, of course, the digital world is having a huge impact on our behaviours, including our consumer behaviours, but certainly for me, my consumer transactions with the Amazon website are extremely transactional. I hear about a book somewhere else and then if I decide to buy it online I often buy it from Amazon. There are two 'tricks' that Amazon has pulled on me (1) is the *branding* trick of making me think of Amazon first before anywhere else and (2) they offer the book to be delivered next day almost always at the cheapest price than other places I occasionally check. Neither of these two fundamental 'tricks' are to do with them having a digital golem of me. They need no further knowledge about me other than that I would like to receive products cheap and fast - just like everyone. It's their huge monopsony power over the suppliers, plus their huge long term investments in automated delivery warehouses that allow them to do (2) and every time they succeed at (2) it re-enforces (1) as I simply associate them with fast, cheap, easy deliver of exactly what I want. What *they* are not doing is influencing what I want. That influence is coming from other media channels, channels that they don't own or control (or even care about). They will sell me anything, so in some sense they don't care what I want. Of course they do sell their own products on their site and that, too is a digital enhancement of the same way that supermarkets often ended up with their own branded versions of highly popular lines. And, basically, I'm saying, let's not be dazzled by the tech into feeling that society has no agency here. Most of these are problematic business practices that we've seen before and could be challenged if we wanted to. And, yes, there is too much lobbying of government to protect such businesses - but that too is nothing to do with the "cloud".

Yeah, again, I'm not trying to suggest that these media empires of different eras are equivalent, indeed there are some very important differences. The most notable difference is that the earlier generation of media moguls had a much stronger ability to control the editorial line they were delivering to their audience. Facebook and Twitter are much more driven by algorithms driving raw attention than by a central editorial line (indeed this is their key defence as to why they are NOT like traditional publishers). But, this difference also means that it is possible for third parties to use these social media platforms for their own agendas, and this may well be counter to the political agenda of the owners of the tech. Indeed, I may be wrong, but I somehow doubt that the owners of Facebook and Twitter were likely to be staunch supporters of Brexit and Trump in 2016, and yet it was those campaigns that most successfully used these platforms to influence opinions *away* from the views of big business interests. So, yes, these social media platforms are hugely influential, but it is not at all clear to me that the owners of the platforms control this influence as much as the old media moguls do. Sure, they make more money, but as individuals they probably have less personal influence through their platforms on, say, elections. And, crucially, the analysis of the impact of social media platforms on the world, is, from my perspective, a very different conversation than you'd have about analysing the impact of companies like Amazon or SHEIN (the Chinese version of Zara + Amazon that is now taking the world by storm) on the consumer products market. Varoufakis swoops these different phenomenon into one attempted "cloud" analysis just like you could imagine someone in the industrial revolution trying to make a "steam" analysis of the changes happening then! .... but, to be clear, I do like other books by him :-)

Hi, thanks! And, yeah, the implications for society are going to be pretty intense whatever happens.

Yes indeed. The next decade will likely see huge political economic changes, and we need to be talking about how to navigate these changes in a way that is as fair as possible, otherwise we're at real risk of entering some seriously dystopian times.

Yeah, very true. But, I'm also seeing many people saying, "we'll know it when we see it!", and we certainly haven't seen it yet. Passing lots of question / answer tests is certainly not a way to test it.

Now there's a plan! 🙂

@@Go-Meta Just think if we spent that much money making people smarter how much better democracy might be. The deception would be harder for media and oligarchy to pull off if methods of debate and critical thinking were started in grammar school.

​​@@TennesseeJed And not just making people smarter but also _wiser..._

@@mrdeanvincent Yep, teaching critical thinking, philosophy and deductive reasoning doesn't serve the oligarchy in making livestock of us though. The mechanical Turk will enrich the owners better than a functional democracy ever could.

Yup, smarter and wiser would be great, and are indeed a key ingredient for a functioning democracy. My big worry with this is that historically capitalists needed a reasonably well educated population in order to work in the factories and offices. But, even without human level AGI, it could be that the capitalist need for human labour is so vastly reduced that they start questioning the value of universal, 'high' quality education. And conversely, if something like UBI is introduced (after all, consumers can't buy things without cash!), then many people growing up might think there is no point in getting an education anyway as they'll get UBI whatever they do. So, I think we're at real risk of a collapse in the perceived value of education, which would be catastrophic. Somehow, we need to engender a culture that values a good education as being an end in itself, rather than just being a way to skill up a workforce.

No, I really was talking about getting inflation back "under control" as in back to 'normal' levels. And, sure, there is an interesting question about what is a 'normal' level of inflation, but given that many central banks have a 2% target, my argument is that inflation (certainly in the UK, and almost in the USA) is now back to these more "normal" levels of inflation that are near or within the target zone of central banks. And this reduction in inflation has happened despite continued, significant deficit spending in the UK and USA. At a most basic level this undermines the suggestion that deficit spending inevitably leads to high levels of inflation. Now, I totally would admit that I have a generous view of MMT, but at a basic level I think proponents of MMT are trying to point out that YES high inflation is damaging for an economy and should be avoided, but, NO inflation is not simply a consequence of deficits. Inflation is way more complex. So, there are many situations when governments can continue to run a deficit without being at risk of causing high levels of inflation. Regarding pensions, many pensions are setup with some level of inflation protection. So, yeah, the difference from 2% to 3% might be significant for those whose pension protection is capped at 2% inflation. But for many well managed pensions they ought to be able to cope with slightly higher levels of inflation and no-one should be keeping their pension (or large savings) in cash under the bed! That really would be devalued by inflation over the long term. But just to be clear, I totally agree that high inflation is a real problem and, as far as I know, MMT advocates never argue that inflation isn't something to worry about. It's just more complex than blaming it simply on government deficits. And, yeah, it is true that my academic background isn't in economics, my PhD is in AI. But I've read and discussed loads of economics, and it seems fairly clear that most economics theories are interesting analysis of a subset of what happens in the real economy! For example, it seems fairly widely agreed that real economies never reach the point of general equilibrium across all sectors. Real economies are way too dynamic for that, with too many information asymmetries; and irrational actors; and external disturbances of one kind or another; and on and on. As for demonstrating the economic backing for what I'm saying, I'm thinking of writing accompanying essays for each video that can have more details for those interested. The reality is that a 20min long video is too long for most people already! So, I probably ought to keep the videos simpler and have more explanatory context elsewhere. Thanks for the comment, I hope my response covered some of your concerns.

Well, if you mean, "do we really have free markets with healthy competition?" then in many contexts the answers is clearly, "no". But our political economy clearly favours the interests of people with large amounts of capital to invest!

Hi, yeah, I think you are right about this shift away from buying things and towards renting digital things (rentier capitalism), and why the term "technofeudalism" sounds so tempting, but I don't think Varoufakis gives a good analysis of why this is happening or what the future prospects are for this aspect of our economy today. In "Chokepoint Capitalism" (which I mention maybe too often in my video 🙂) they talk about how laws (like the DMCA in USA) and the style with which antitrust laws are applied, are the biggest drivers of this current, extractive digital rentier economy as, without this legal protection, a lot of these digital 'goods' have essentially zero cost to reproduce and could in the future be shared on fairer platforms that channel more of the revenue from such digital goods towards the creators rather than to the platform and publishing corporations. So, I think Varoufakis's analysis is wrong to think there is something fundamental to the tech (rather than the laws around the tech) that is giving rise to this feeling of being stuck in a feudal relationship. And, if the laws are the real impediment, then there is no reason (in theory!) why western democratic governments couldn't be pushed by voters to make these laws more fair - and there is some evidence that that is starting to happen. Also, I think Varoufakis's analysis lacked any attempt to demonstrate the scale of this "technofeudal" aspect of the current economy. Lots of the real economy is still focused on non-digital goods like, construction, physical goods, food, transport, energy, healthcare, education, etc, etc. .... all of which are still largely running in a traditional mixed economy model of political economy that has been like that for many, many decades. So, yeah, "technofeudalism" captures the feeling of some parts of the relatively recent digital economy, but I'm not convinced by Varoufakis's claim that it's the best description of the overall political economy that we live in today. Thanks for the comment.

Yeah, and containerisation and jet aircraft were also crucial for this globalisation and shrinking of distances. And, the logistics in the material world are often going to be more significant to a business maintaining dominance than network effects and data hording / user surveillance in the "cloud". Of course there are exceptions (like the seeming stickiness of Twitter / X), but I don't see these "cloud" aspects of the economy being as dominant as Varoufakis is claiming.

You obviously missed the bits of the video where I was critical of Amazon business practices as a monopsony and welcomed the EU and US investigations into their anti-competitive behaviours. It is possible to take a more nuanced position than being either a hard core anti-capitalist or a corporate shill, but I clearly need to get better at expressing this position 😃

Most of my expenditure is on items like housing, utilities, transport, food, travel, not on things like Spotify or Netflix. I occasionally go to LinkedIn, hardly go on Facebook, try to ignore Twitter and have no account on TikTok, Instagram or the others. Yes network effects and platform lock in are real issues, but it just doesn't add up to suggest they are dominating our economy in a way that has ushered in a new economic paradigm. The 19th C version of capitalism may have died long ago, but it is not because of techno feudalism. Thanks for the comment 👍

@@Go-Meta Thanks

Thank you!

Sorry my dish wasn't to your taste this time, I'll try to deliver some tasty doughnuts in my next videos!

Urm ... do you mean the Canadian rapper?

@@Go-Meta way to stay on brand, does he rap or sing? this is the kind of homie to tell you Yoko broke up the Beatles .. . .

Hey Phil, it's a pretty cool feature isn't it. ChatGPT taught me how to use it 😃!

Yeah, I haven't yet had the time to check out the latest version of Claude, but it does sound very good.

Hi, I'm not sure to be honest, but I would guess that Blender will work fine for some things, just not very complicated scenes. My suggestion is that you just give it a go (assuming you already have that particular computer). Hope it works well 👍

@@Go-Meta thank you so much

Hi Manuele, I don't think ChatGPT could do what you might be hoping for. You can probably go from image -> text description of the image -> python script for Blender -> very rough model of something similar to what was in the original image. But I'm fairly confident that (at the moment) you couldn't use ChatGPT to capture an accurate 3D model representation of what is in an image. For that, your best bet would be to look for more specific 3D modelling tools.

​@@Go-Meta Yeah chatgpt can identify some things in some pictures. But it seems very reluctant to commit itself about details. I think it's been biased to say it can't understand the contents of a picture rather than to guess wrong.

Hey Jeremy, thanks! And, yeah, I am trying hard to keep the videos as short as possible, as you have correctly suggested to me! 😃

Yeah, the scripting feature is really useful! ... especially with ChatGPT as a guide 😃 And, thanks for the encouraging comment 🙏

Thank you! 🙏

Thanks!

Hi John, Yes indeed, the vast majority of actual money in circulation comes from commercial banks, and it's a big omission from my video that I didn't mention this. I wish I could re-edit and insert an extra bit about that. Maybe one day I'll make a new version and explain why this part of the story can sort of be "bracketed off" from the story about government spending and deficits and what it means to be the official issuer of the currency. And, I think of the commercial bank lending/creation of money as being a multiplier effect on the underlying money creation/lending that the central bank/government does. As an analogy with the Bitcoin world, I think of the commercial lending as being little bit like the layer 2 of the Bitcoin world (things like Lightning), whereas the central bank money creation is the Bitcoin backbone (of course there are disanalogies there too!) But I'd also note that I think it's a mistake for anyone to think that the central bank is only capable of creating money in the same sense that the commercial lenders can. The central banks really do have a different relation to their particular fiat currency compared to other actors like commercial banks. But I should have made these point in my video..... another time! Thanks for the comment (and the other one! 🙂 )

And I also forgot to say, thanks for mentioning Jeff Schneider and John Titus. I have just subscribed to both of their channels and I look forward to watching their videos. They both look interesting, thanks!

@@Go-Meta sorry if I sound a bit harsh and I have the deficit myth book by Stephanie Kelton but I am guilty of not reading it as of yet, I will listen to all points of view about the financial system but I do have my own own opinions too, and on the subject of MMT I think professor Steve Keen is some one else worth listening to, however unfortunately in my opinion it also comes down to the quality of people in what ever institution or government we care to name and that's why I would not buy a US treasury or a UK gilt because I know who I am actually funding, but I would not buy any of the tech stocks either, for the same reason, however I do support financially things like the Corbett report and would support anything to do with natural farming

No worries at all, I didn't read it as harsh - I welcome all push back and comments that are engaging with the subject at hand! 👍 I actually listened to Steve Keen's interview with Lex Fridman a year ago or so, and I've just seen that Keen has just linked to that interview on Twitter: x.com/ProfSteveKeen/status/1804953318722355525 And, I'll take a look at the Corbett Report too, thanks 👍

I agree with this statement (although I'd note a very minor quibble with the suggestion that it is us rather than the commercial lenders who are creating the money - even if they are creating it for us), but I'd also refer you (and others reading!) to the answer I gave to your other comment. Commercial lending may create the largest volume of money by scale, but not by significance. Note, for example, it is not this commercial lending of money that makes people worry about inflationary effects. They only worry about government borrowing causing inflation and, in some sense, this shows that they understand that government "borrowing" is often much closer in reality to government printing of money - as MMT advocates say 🙂

@@Go-Meta You say " Commercial lending may create the largest volume of money by scale, but not by significance.. Totally wrong again because over 90% of money in the economy is created by private banks. That is more than just significant and the major amount of spending which creates most of the tax that government collects and government then spends. Mosler himself says 'the purpose of taxes is to provision government.' - he is the originator of MMT. How is that money collected from the private sector for government to spend "not significant" ? You need to explain or admit you are wrong and have misled people?

Hi Rob, I meant "not significant" with respect to people's narratives around inflation as most commentators I have seen focus their thinking around the actions of the central bank which has huge influence over the total envelope of money that the commercial banks can 'create' through lending. As far as I know, the central bank does this through three main levers: *) The total monetary base *) The reserve requirements *) The central bank interest rates So, yes, commercial banks lend out a 'significant' amount of money, but I get the impression that most commentators think of commercial banks as being a multiplier effect, with the central bank's choices (+ Treasury) as being the main driver of the "printing money causes inflation" narrative. I guess every short comment or description of these really complex phenomenon is going to be slightly wrong or not perfectly phrased 🙂 Cheers, Oli

The real country that needs explanation is Japan. Decades of printing money while having very low levels of inflation with a constant threat of deflation and very low interest rates. All of this while NOT being the worlds reserve currency. MMT advocates don't ignore the real risks of hyperinflation and persistent high inflation, as suffered by Argentina, but they just note that perfectly balanced budgets are not essential for maintaining a regime of low inflation. Indeed, MMT detractors have to explain why inflation in the USA has come down despite continued 'printing' of money! The point is that inflation is more of a complex beast than simply being a reflection of printing money.

@@Go-Meta You are totally wrong in saying there has been low inflation for Japan. There has been high inflation because the price of their government borrowing over the past 30 years or more has resulted in their currency falling in value by at least 60% compared with other currencies. Your wrong understanding results from looking purely at their internal CPI prices alone instead of their external and internal situation. Price of their currency has fallen from 82 yen per U.S. dollar in the early 1990's to 160 yen per U.S. dollar now.

Yeah, "Once confidence is lost", but at the moment the USA is one of the few high income countries with a good level of growth (as far as I recall) and so confidence is a long way from being lost in the dollar economy as such. The biggest risk to confidence in the dollar in recent years has not come from the high level of deficit spending (which many other countries are doing too), but rather from kicking Russia off the Swift system and into the welcoming arms of China. Those kinds of geo-political moves is what is spooking other countries into de-dollarisation, rather than the printing. So, yes the benefits to the USA of being the global hegemonic currency are maybe coming to an end, but that is not being driven by the deficit spending of USA which is not that different from many other countries' behaviours. As I mentioned in my other reply, MMT is the best explanation I am aware of for the last few decades of Japanese macro-economics. Thanks for the comments 👍

Hi Rob, I totally agree that inflation is a real problem to take seriously, but the last few decades of the Japanese economy is not a great example for your case. What you have pointed out is the change in value of the Yen vs Dollar over a time period, and I get why you are pointing to that as a "loss in value" of the Yen, but that is not how inflation is usually measured and often fluctuations in relative currency values often have to do with a much broader set of influences than money supply in one country. For Japanese people, living and working and spending in Yen, they haven't been experiencing inflation of prices with respect to their consumer price index for many decades. Quite the reverse, their inflation figures have been near zero or below! (look at the % change over the max timeframe in data linked below): tradingeconomics.com/japan/consumer-price-index-cpi And to try to boost economic activity and spending they have also kept their interest rate around 0% for multiple decades too (again look at the max timeline for the data below): tradingeconomics.com/japan/interest-rate And then, if Yen has a 0% interest rate, but the dollar or other currencies have a higher interest rate then, sure financial markets will move money out of Yen and into other currencies in order to get the higher returns - which pushes down the value of the Yen as you were referring to. And, in turn, this actually will make Japanese goods cheaper to sell across the world, helping their exports and therefore their balance of trade. Add in the fact that, unlike the dollar, the Japanese Yen is not the world's reserve currency and I actually think the Japanese economy is the best exemplar of why MMT is a good overall way to understand fiat currencies. But, don't get me wrong, I do agree that there is a level of creation of money that would be "too much" and would cause damaging inflation. But that doesn't mean that perfectly balanced budgets are necessary.

@@Go-Meta You say "For Japanese people, living and working and spending in Yen, they haven't been experiencing inflation of prices with respect to their consumer price index for many decades." That may be so to an extent but the greater view of the value of the currency shows there is inflation that has diminished the purchasing power of their currency. The discussion is about the purchasing power of the currency and not the internal effects of that on the population because those internal effects on their people are also dependent on the fact that their own debts of government are internal and not a massive external debt like in other countries including the U.S. The first thing that differ in Japan from most other countries is their huge amount of foreign assets that are invested overseas and this contrasts vastly with the U.S. I don't know how you can rationally use the Japanese situation now to justify the MMT. Japan has had three decades of low growth which compares very badly with their previously well reported growth in the purchasing power of their money and overseas which has now reversed and as I have pointed out and which you seem to have ignored. Additionally the massive buy up by Japan of overseas assets has declined in the past 30 years. Also the population has reduced by 15 million in the last 30 years which means greater proportional investment benefits for those currently existing. This too contrast greatly with other countries and in its absence would have negatively figured on the ability of the population to spend due to increased demand on consumer goods. MMT does not address the historical facts which I have pointed out are contrary to the MMT beliefs. MMT does not also address the fact that central banks who actually create money themselves contradict the money creation theory of MMT which says the government has to spend first before taxes can be collected.

MMT is a macro economic theory about how money works for countries that issue fiat currency. Detractors of MMT say that it is wrong because you have to (a) balance your budgets and (b) if you don't balance your budgets but instead keep printing money then you will cause high inflation *within* your economy because you are debasing the value of your currency. The last decades of Japanese economic history says, "no, you are wrong" to the detractors of MMT. They haven't been balancing their budgets, they have been printing large amounts of money, but they haven't experienced high inflation within their economy. In many ways it really is that simple.

​@@Go-MetaJapan is a good example of Mosler's theory that the interest rate equals the inflation rate. Simplicity really is key to understanding MMT. Pretty obvious in retrospect that you cannot tax a population if you don't first issue them the $ to pay that tax with. It seems mainstream economic theorists always want to start their theories somewhere in the middle and pretend their foundations are solid,- then you can create your own invisible hand(s) and attribute it to Adam Smith or buy your own nobel prize category. It's really pretty entertaining to watch the same groups that accepts these and other clear myths (like using GDP as a measure for economic strength) apply their fuzzy logic to mmt so vociferously.

Hi again Rob, I agree that I should have at least mentioned that most of the money supply by volume is generated by commercial banks. That was a definite oversight in my script. But I guess I often just think of this as a multiplier of the underlying level of money in the system as created by the central banks. And the real confusions are around what the central banks are doing. In particular there are two legal fictions going on that most people seem to ignore, but MMT advocates highlight. The first is that the central bank doesn't lend money to the government. The only way in which this legal fiction is true is if you add "directly" into that sentence, because central banks around the world do buy up huge volumes of their government's debt through the secondary market. If I recall something like 50% of Japan's national debt is now been bought by Japan's central bank. So, yeah, they don't lend directly, but indirectly they effectively do lend money to their respective governments. The second legal fiction is that these two parts of government are separate legal entities. Again, technically this isn't a complete fiction, but in reality governments setup the legal context in which central banks exist. You could say that the governments wholly own and control the central banks, even if they have currently granted them operational independence. So, to create money, one part of the government can effectively lend money to another part of the government. Something that commercial banks cannot do. And, unlike the commercial banks, there is no regulatory limit to how much money can be lent (/created). Sure the debt sits on a spreadsheet somewhere, but it's just not the same as when one legal entity lends money to a genuinely separate legal entity (like an investor or a separate country's central bank). So, yes, when investors and other countries lend money to the US government, they can always be sure that the debt will be paid back. But the situation just isn't the same when the government debt is just owed to another part of government. And while I agree that the bucket metaphor is a very simplified way of looking at the movement of money, but it is a useful way to explain the relationships between government deficits / surpluses and the opposite effect happening on the rest of the economy. But I think "vast simplification" would be more accurate than them being "nonsense" 🙂

Hi Rob, I know that I take quite a generous view of MMT, especially because they often (Kelton included) seem to explain their ideas poorly. I think the "taxes put value onto money" is a quite poor way of noting that the government, and all the people involved in the economic activities associated with the government (including those being paid by the government and those paying taxes and indeed the fact that the government insists that their currency is legal tender), mean that the value of, say, the dollar is backed by the huge activities of the USA government in the USA economy. So, there is a sense in which the dollar wont disappear or have its value drop to zero unless the government disappears. The most interesting examples of this (IMHO) are when a nation has the value of its currency debased to near zero by hyper-inflation (which I agree is a real and serious potential problem for any fiat currency), but then it simply launches a new version of its currency (with some various tactics to rebuild trust in the government), and pretty much overnight that new version of the currency gets adopted and used by millions of people undertaking potentially billions of dollars equivalent of business. No cryptocurrency has ever had such a fast and rapid uptake, and it is hard to imagine it ever happening. What makes this rapid update of a new version of the currency work so rapidly at such scale is precisely that the government sits behind this currency and (a) pays all its workers and suppliers in that new currency, (b) insists that it is now legal tender that all markets have to accept and (c) insists that all future taxes are paid in that new currency. And *this* is what MMT advocates are trying to point to with their stories about tax putting a value on the currency.

@@Go-Meta You want to change the words that MMT uses to suite your version of what they mean when they say "Taxes put value into the money" so you can change it's meaning. So new what else do you want to change what they say? You also say " No cryptocurrency has ever had such a fast and rapid uptake, and it is hard to imagine it ever happening." This is just false because new currencies have not been taken up in countries where the previous ones failed without structural reform and interventions in the way of backing by interests other than the government. If you disagree then give examples of currencies that have been taken up rapidly without structural reforms and intervention by outside entities. In respect to crypto currencies they have been taken up rapidly and risen to unforeseen values without any government interventions that cause them to have value or being accepted. Explain why this has been so if you accept a theory that says money gets its value and acceptance through taxes. You might also like to explain why increased taxes do not make the money more valuable if the value is derived from taxes.

Advocates of MMT maybe say about 10 or so different things that they think are true. I'm just saying that I agree with say 5 or 6 out of 10 of those things, but I think they are the core things that are interesting about MMT (e.g. reversing the order from tax-then-spend to spend-then-tax; and that perfectly balanced budgets are not necessary - what really matters is inflation) But I do not agree with MMT advocates that the value of money is derived from taxes. I do, however, agree with something adjacent to that, which is that the value of a country's money is hugely backed up by the economic and legal and tax activities of the government of the country that issues the currency. With regard to new currencies being adopted, you are right that I maybe understated the importance of what I said in brackets "(with some various tactics to rebuild trust in the government)", because I agree that there are huge trust issues that need to have changed in order for the new currency to be seen as different from the old one. But, with the help of ChatGPT ( 😂 ) I've just compiled a list of examples where a country introduced a new currency to replace its old currency in order to help tackle high levels of inflation *without* having the new currency explicitly backed by another asset (like gold, or dollar or land or whatever). But, yes all of these changes were also accompanied by significant economic policy changes to help improve confidence in the government issuing the new currency: In 1985, Israel changed from Old Shekel (ILR) to the New Israeli Shekel (ILS) In 1991, Peru changed from Inti (PEI) to the Nuevo Sol (PEN) In 1994, Brazil changed from Cruzeiro (BRB) to the Real (BRL) In 2005, Turkey changed from Turkish Lira (TRL) to the New Turkish Lira (TRY) In 2019, Zimbabwe changed from Zimbabwean Dollar (ZWL) to the RTGS Dollar (ZWL) Some of these were more successful than others, but the point still stands that it is the economic strength (or not!) of the government that is standing behind these newly adopted currencies. Now, of course, if a country put its economic weight behind the adoption of a crypto currency (e.g. a CBDC for example!!! ) then, yes you would get the same adoption behaviour. But I think that reinforces the sense that the value and confidence in the currency is NOT coming because of a sense that these are debt-backed fiat currencies (or crypto currencies in the case of a CBDC), but because the government is standing behind it. This is what I think MMT advocates are pointing towards (very badly!!) when they say that "value of money is derived from taxes". As I say in my video, I think MMT has got its branding and explanations all messed up, but they do have some good ideas none the less 😀

@@Go-Meta Yes it is the economic strength of the economy that determines if the money is worth anything. But that economic strength depends ultimately on many skill that the population have amongst which is the requirement to have financial skills and structure of the money system that is stable in purchasing power over time so risk and reward type investment is encoraged. The MMT has not gotten its branding mixed but has the basic information incorrect and regularly confuses concepts throughout. Zimbabwe has embarked on a repeat of what it did twenty years ago with selling government debt at an unsustainable interest rate in order to fund excessive government spending above tax receipts. The inflation cycle we saw then has now repeated itself and their currency failed in 2023 after excessive inflation. The new currency which replaces it was replaced at an agreed exchange rate for the previous one. Despite that new currency being introduced in May 2024 (the ZIG) the still preferred currency of Zimbabwe people is the U.S. dollar which accounts for 85% of all transactions which puts a hammer into the belief that government can mandate a new currency and have it taken up rapidly by the public. Gold has increased in price in most coutries over the past year so any currency tied to it should also be stable and rising. All that is despite the ZIG being backed by gold according to the Zimbabwe government it shows you how the bad financial reputation of the government still lives on.

@@Go-Meta You say " I think MMT has got its branding and explanations all messed up, but they do have some good ideas none the less". What are their good ideas that are workable? None that I can see except wish lists that are incompatible with the real situation which anyone can dream about but not contribute to solving but will only make things worse because they are derived from poor observations. - Just like someone who thinks he is in New York and wants to fly his plane to L.A. California but really is in Texas so tries to fly to the west and ends up in the ocean.

I'm not at all suggesting that we should scrap capitalism, and indeed it's an interesting quote you mention from Chomsky as it seems to imply a similar thought to one that I've had, which is that progressives should actually encourage proper functioning markets for certain sectors of the economy. What we often have instead is more like corporatism supported by a captured (corrupted!) government, so a genuine competitive market place would often be an improvement. I guess my overall point in the video is to encourage "anti-government" libertarians to recognise the essential role of government, and indeed "anti-capitalists" to recognise that capitalism can be a very effective way to organise certain parts of the political economy. They both have problems, but they both have strengths too and we need them both, working together. But if that didn't come across in my video then I need to improve my scripting 😀 as I certainly don't want to come across as just asking questions. At the very least I hope I am hinting at the route towards solutions 😀 Thanks for the comment.

Hey Giles, thanks! 👍

Hi, yes, I agree, which is why I don't understand it when some people take an "anti-capitalist" stance. But, I guess the key point I'm trying to make in my video is that I also don't understand taking an "anti-government" stance when actually many of the nice things you mentioned, (freedom of opinion, access to education/health) are not things that capitalist mechanisms are capable of delivering exclusively by themselves. Liberal, democratic governments are also an essential part of the package. To have a flourishing, liberal society we need a healthy interplay between liberal democracy and market capitalism with a continual attempt to seek out and get rid of the worst aspects of both of them, but to also improve and champion the best bits of both of them.

@@Go-Meta Hmm... You seem to build a good case for the straw man position. It seems to me, that the logical next step for libertarians should be in political science -- like building theories about how a state can make it visible, when political parties do a regulatory capture and start misusing resources to stay in power. Which is quite funny.

Any work to help shine a disinfecting light on the worst abuses of state power would be great. While I champion the role of the liberal, democratic state, I certainly agree that there are many aspects of it that need to be radically improved.

Interesting. And, now you mention it, I knew that the "Asian Tigers" had a lot of deliberate industrial policies supporting their growth and for some reason it just hadn't clicked that these are precisely the countries that Norberg is talking about! And it would indeed have been an excellent point to add into the section about industrial policies at the end. China too is not exactly "laissez-faire" to its high growth market economy. Thanks for the comment.

Doesn’t change the fact it’s a market capitalist society, just with extra government involvement and propping up infant industries early on

I agree. I guess the point here is more about questioning why some people seem to want to take a sort of "anti-government" stance, when actually, as demonstrated by the Asian Tigers, effective government industrial policy can often be a great boost to the growth and healthy functioning of the capitalist market economy. We need both to have a thriving liberal society.

Hi Max, thanks for this good push back! I completely agree that the incentives in government are often set up in a terrible way. I guess I'll make some theoretical points and then some practical ones too. Theory: Firstly, in the bit about governments being the "just" way to update the laws, what I mean is simply that politicians and governments legislate the new laws and it is better that this is done via a democratic form of politics rather than autocratic or purely technocratic (which, without democratic oversight is just another form of autocracy). So it is only through the democratic process that (IMHO) laws have any legitimacy. And since voters choose the politicians, the new laws ought to reflect in some sense the goals of broader society. Practice: Our democracies are not nearly as well setup as they could be. In particular I think the effectively 2-party system in UK and USA is not a healthy way for democracy to work. So, lots and lots to improve there. But democracy is fundamentally the right kind of political system. Theory: At a basic level capitalism is based on incentives from the market, government is based on incentives from voters. So, even if both have big problems with how these incentive actually work out, in theory what is good is that they derive their power and incentives from different mechanisms and therefore can act as a check and balance on each other's incentive structures. Practice: Yup, as you say, lobbying is rife in governments and they do indeed operate with terribly bad incentives in the budgeting processes. BUT, I would say that these are both things that can be worked on and improved. Lobbying should be reduced to sensible levels of industry advice and all done with transparency and companies should not be able to fund parties / candidates. Government budgeting should be changed to introduce incentives for saving money and indeed for sensible collaboration across budget centres so that we get better outcomes from our government spending. Definitely agree this ought to be improved urgently! Theory: My point about poor people being effectively invisible to the market is why it is fundamentally impossible for a purely capitalist mechanism to 'solve' a whole bunch of society's problems. That doesn't mean that government does its job well, but simply that capitalism alone cannot solve these problems at all. Practice: Norberg actually has a very interesting chapter in which he talks about the shameful rise of "deaths of despair" and makes a fairly compelling case that quite a lot of this is due to failures of government policy. So, I completely agree that government often makes problems worse rather than helping to solve them. But, that doesn't mean that markets are going to suddenly care about these people with no money and no useful job skills. This is a case where governments have to get their act together and do a much better job. And, yes, government often does and should use capitalist companies to deliver the outcomes that it is funding. So the two should work together. Some last points to note here: If AI does indeed shift the thresholds of what skill level you need (or physical capabilities you need) in order to be useful to capitalist companies, this could massively increase the number of people who are effectively invisible to the market. This is why I don't think it is helpful to pretend that the market will start caring for these people, when actually we need to embrace **and fix** government to do its part of the deal properly. And I'm certainly not pushing for "utopia now!", we just need to try to improve how things work year on year. In my view "the good society" is about the *means* by which we continually try to improve our society in face of the new challenges that will always arrive. There is no ends/means distinction. And, finally, it's really hard to know what to put into a video and what to leave out :-) they're always too long anyway! So, I really appreciate the style of your push back and I hope these further comments make some sense too. Cheers, Oli

@@Go-Meta Hi Oli, I appreciate the detailed response and have been thinking about your various points, however, I noticed that my comment is hidden from the video page. Do you know why this is?

Hi Max, No, I noticed that too, but actually have no idea why it happened. I saw your comment via one route, but not through others. It's very odd and a shame as I certainly would want your comment and the discussion visible to everyone. I certainly have not clicked on any kind of ''hide' option. There's also a weird formatting issue where the "...read more" link comes at the top of your comment rather than the bottom, so I don't know if there is some sort of extra or odd character in your comment that is making the system treat it in a different way. Maybe try editing out any potentially odd characters. I guess one way to do this might be to select the text and paste it into plaintext format like notepad and then back out again - but I'm just guessing at what might be the cause. Hope there is something obvious like that which fixes it. Cheers, Oli

... and I've just double checked that it certainly isn't in an automatic "held for review" kind of mode. It just doesn't show up by default. For me to see it I have to order the comments by 'Newest' and then it shows up. It's very odd.

Another option would be if you re-post your initial comment, then I'll repost my reply and then hopefully that version of the comment thread will be visible to everyone.

Well, I think we need a healthy balance between democratically constrained 'stupid' people and market constrained 'stupid' people 😃

Thanks Ron, and yeah, I agree, "cloudalist" is such a clunky term!