Why is Steve Keen not at the Leeds MMT Conference?
I’m guessing that a few attendees may ask themselves that question, since I’ve been asked the same when I’ve told people that I won’t be attending.
I did plan to attend, and submitted a paper entitled “Proving the fundamental principles of MMT using Minsky” (attached to this post), which was accepted by the organizers.
Then I was disinvited by the following email on May 29th:
Dear Steve,
I regret to inform you that the organising committee has rescinded your invitation to present at the UK MMT Conference.
Your YouTube stream (https://www.youtube.com/live/MNpVQvgzn30?si=Bi8IVDoMMCwisHPb) has not been well-received within the MMT community. Warren, in particular, has expressed dissatisfaction with your misrepresentation of the MMT position on the export/import issue despite his continued attempts to clarify it. As the conference is at Warren's request, your presentation cannot proceed.
I apologise for having to convey this disappointing news. I had hoped for a constructive exchange of ideas.
Best regards,
It’s an understatement to say that I was outraged by this decision. I have never been disinvited from a conference before, not even when I was presenting anti-Neoclassical papers at Neoclassical conferences.
It might have been slightly less offensive if I was in fact contesting the issue that was the justification for my disinvitation: “the MMT position on the export/import issue”. But as you can see from the paper’s title, I was not going to speak on that topic. Though I had expressed criticisms of MMT on this point, I had scrupulously avoided writing up those criticisms, because I am very aware of MMT’s achievement of being the first non-mainstream economics concept to get into the public debate since Keynes. I did not want to harm that success by giving the real enemies of MMT—Neoclassical economists—the ammunition of a split in the MMT community.
Instead, I was going to present shows how the Minsky system dynamics program I invented (now called Ravel) could be used to prove MMT’s fundamental tenets. It included a complete tabulation of the core financial operations in government money creation (see Figure 1), and a model that showed that Coolidge’s surpluses during the 1920s helped cause the Great Depression (see Figure 2). A major criticism of MMT by its real enemies—again, Neoclassical economists, not yours truly—is that no MMTer has ever presented a mathematical model of MMT. Minsky generates those equations, which were also part of this paper (see Figure 3).
In other words, it was my intention to praise MMT, not to bury it. I was going to ignore the 5% I criticise to help the 95% I support—and if you’re an “MMTer” and you doubt these proportions, ask yourself whether you’d still be an activist for MMT if the only thing it asserted was that “Imports are real benefits and exports are real costs”? (Mosler 2010, p. 59)
But in a celebration of what is called “The Narcissism of Small Differences”, the fact that I wasn’t 100% in agreement with MMT was sufficient to disinvite me from the conference.
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump.
I said, "Don't do it!"
He said, "Nobody loves me."
I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"
He said, "Yes."
I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?"
He said, "A Christian."
I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?"
He said, "Protestant."
I said, "Me, too! What franchise?"
He said, "Baptist."
I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?"
He said, "Northern Baptist."
I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?" ~
He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist."
I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?"
He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region."
I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?"
He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912."
I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over. (Emo Phillips)
Figure 1: Figure 19 from my disinvited paper for the Leeds MMT conference
Figure 2: Figure 23 from my paper, showing how Coolidge's surpluses contributed to the Great Depression
Figure 3: The differential equations generated by the Minsky model in Figure 1
Mosler, Warren. 2010. The 7 Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy.
I recently noted in a comment on a Youtube clip by GhostOnTheHalfShell That MMT followers are almost always zealous acolytes who have discovered MMT being presented by other zealous acolytes as a fully-formed, out-of the box, fit-and-forget panacea for all the world's economic woes. This is a very beguiling proposition indeed- in the same category as the Christian Evangelists' 'all you need to do to gain everlasting life is to accept Jesus died for your sins', thereby absolving the subject from the necessity of living a virtuous life. Another similarity to Christian Evangelism is that the acolyte will accept no criticism of the true prophet- the adoration of Mosler in this case is often little short of fawning sycophancy. This has not been helped by the fact that other popular MMT 'Public Personae' such as Stephanie Kelton have glibly failed to make a clear distinction between money for public purpose being raised by bond sales to private financiers, which is generally approved of by the finance sector, since it profits them at the expense of the public, and bonds being 'sold' to the Central Bank directly, which is only approved as an 'emergency measure' such as wartime, since that sidelines the financiers.
In my opinion these cultish adorations and omissions are a deliberate obfuscation to paper over the vast cracks of the political chasm that MMT / Post Keynesian ideas have to cross, notwithstanding their technical correctness, which is that the governments of the so-called 'free' world are simply the minions of the combined finance sectors of those countries, Particularly in the USA where penetration of government by Wall Street started (probably) with Henry Morgenthau in the 1930's and became total with Robert Rubin in the 1990's to the extent that the entire US government is now little more than the military branch of Wall Street's global dominion. The same is true of the City of London etc, but it's not a case of individual governments being dominated by their national finance sectors- it's all governments dominated by the entire sector at the same time.
It's all very well Mosler fanboys admonishing heretics, Kelton making cute movies, and even Steve and his system-dynamics buddies making long-form presentations on Youtube, but the elephant in the room is that the obstacle to change is 99% political and only 1% technical. To go back to the religious metaphor I used earlier, if the leaders of 'Christian Evangelism' were to tell their acolytes to give up their wealth and property, share everything they have with strangers and to emulate the life of the disciples, rather than some cutesy trope about 'faith alone conquering death', they would be talking to an empty room. The cult of MMT as a hobby interest but without political action is a similar cutesy trope.
Steve, I think I understand your difference with standard MMT on imports & exports being one of relative cost vs benefit, and also oversimplification. Would you elaborate on what aggravated the Leeds leadership beyond this because I'm missing something.