Introduction to Modern Monetary Theory
Henry George School of Social Science (online)
James E Keenan, instructor
November-December 2020The reading list is divided into three categories:
My hope is that you will purchase and read one book from each of the first two categories.
Robert Hockett and Aaron James, Money from Nothing: Or, Why We Should Stop Worrying about Debt and Learn to Love the Federal Reserve, Melville House, 2020.
Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy, Public Affairs/Hachette Book Group, 2020.
Richard Murphy, The Joy of Tax: How a fair tax system can create a better society, Corgi Books/Transworld Publishers, 2015.
L. Randall Wray, Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 (second edition).
J.D. Alt, Paying Ourselves to Save the Planet: A Layman's Explanation of Modern Money Theory, Kindle Direct Publishing, 2020.
Warren Mosler, Soft Currency Economics II: What Everyone Thinks They Know About Monetary Policy Is Wrong, Valance Company, 2012.
Yeva Nersisyan and L. Randall Wray, How to Pay for the Green New Deal, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, Working Paper No. 931, 2019. http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_931.pdf
Pavlina R. Tcherneva, The Case for a Job Guarantee, Polity Press, 2020.
Christine Desan, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism, Oxford University Press, 2014.
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Melville House, 2014.
Robert C. Hockett, Financing the Green New Deal: A Plan of Action and Renewal, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
John Maynard Keynes, How to Pay for the War, Macmillan, 1940.
William Mitchell, L. Randall Wray and Martin Watts, Macroeconomics, Red Globe Press/Macmillan International, 2019.
Warren Mosler, The 7 Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy, Valance Company, 2010.
Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla, L'Arme Invisible de la Françafrique: Une Histoire du Franc CFA, La Decouverte, 2018. (In French)
Robert Skidelsky, Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics, Yale University Press, 2018.
L. Randall Wray, Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability, Edward Elgar, 1998.
The instructor may be contacted at: lerner.minsky@gmail.com
Students are encourged to join one or both of two Google Groups set up to function as mailing lists. To join you need an email address associated with any Google product, i.e., a Gmail account or a YouTube account. To join either:
The groups:
MMT at HGSSS Fall 2020
MMT at HGSSS Fall 2020. This group is specifically for students in the Fall 2020 course at HGSSS. It will exist only for the duration of the course plus 30 days and will be deleted on or around January 8, 2021.
Modern Monetary Theory
Modern Monetary Theory. This group was co-founded by the instructor and is where many of his posts can be located. It is intended to provide a location for lay people to post questions and answers about MMT.
The great-grandfather of Slack, IRC is a communications protocol which actually pre-dates HTTP (the World Wide Web). Get yourself an IRC client program (e.g., Pidgin Instant Messenger, mIRC or IRCCloud) or use the browser interface mentioned below.
On the Freenode IRC network there is a channel called #MMT. By logging on to this channel you can interact with the instructor and any other people interested in MMT. You can also use Freenode's web client, Kiwi.