Democracy at Work's Paul Sliker and Dante Dallavalle talk with Michael Hudson, one of the world’s six economists who accurately predicted the 2007-2008 financial crisis. His new book, J is for Junk Economics, reveals how the mainstream economic vocabulary has been turned around in an Orwellian way to mean just the opposite of what words used to mean. Michael explains how the corporate media and academia use well-crafted euphemisms to conceal how the economy really works, the economy under Obama vs. Trump, and what might be coming next.
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Praise for the book:
"There are few people alive who have taught me more than Michael Hudson. [His] incisive and brilliant essays... should be assigned to every first year student of economics."
— David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and co-organizer of Occupy Wall Street
"A dictionary of Junk Economics is a concept so good I wish I'd thought of it, but there's no better person than Michael Hudson to write it. There's so much junk, and it deserves his classically-informed barbs linking today's neat, plausible, and wrong economics to the Sophists of Ancient Greece, the philosophers-for-hire who used superficially plausible logic to distract discussion away from real substance."
— Steve Keen, economist and author of Debunking Economics
"Michael Hudson is the best economist in the world... Readers often ask me how they can learn economics. My answer is to spend many hours with Hudson's book [Killing The Host]. First, read the book through once or twice in order to get an idea of what is covered. Then study it closely section by section. When you understand the book, you will understand economics better than any Nobel Prize-winning economist. Many current events cannot be understood independently of Hudson's explanation of the financialized Western economy."
— Paul Craig Roberts, former under-secretary of the U.S. Treasury (Reagan Administration) and author of The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West
For more on Michael, please visit michael-hudson.com
Showing 10 comments
Wolff has a loyal fanbase and so does Hudson. It may be well worth your time to listen to some of their viewpoints. You may not agree with them; however, it is important to listen to the other side.
What John C and Martin Screeton both said at the bottom show that they may be followers of Hudson.
James Jackson
Employed @ http://www.treeservicesatlantaga.com
According to mainstream economists, governments should never issue their own currency because it begets hyper-inflation. To prove their argument, they point to some examples where states have printed money and there has been hyper-inflation (e.g. Weimar Germany, Vietnam, Iran, etc.). Their alternative is to borrow the money from either other governments, international financial institutions (such as IMF or World Bank), or from private banks.
The truth, however, is that as long as a government issues new currency to fuel and support domestic growth, there will be no inflation. This kind of severe hyper-inflation is always a consequence of only two possibilities: 1) a balance of trade deficit, and 2) scarcity in domestic market. The former is the main case for developed nations (such as Germany during Weimar republic), and the latter is the acute problem of all third-world and underdeveloped countries. Both cases are exacerbated by the neoliberal prescription (to finance government deficit through borrowing rather than printing their own money).
Why is this neoliberal nonsensical ideology so pervasive then? Precisely because the financial class has become dominant. Finance is decoupled from the real economy and pursuits its own agenda independently. Michael Hudson explains it all too brilliantly, so I would not like to reiterate all he has already said.
http://www.participatoryeconomics.info/
https://zcomm.org/life-after-capitalism/
I also believe historically progressive struggle advances more when gains are made than when backslides happen. Intermediate progressive gains like a living wage, debt forgiveness, universal health care, tuition free education… remove people from precarious positions and frees up precious time for learning and understanding and becoming more politically involved, enroute to a more egalitarian, inclusive, caring, empathetic, cooperative and participatory society. We must struggle to understand the world as it really exists and IMHO economics, the financial world and particularly money are best understood through the teachings of what has become call MMT. For people working towards the above stated progressive advances there are some simple truths about how money actually functions that need to be clearly understood:
THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION “How are we going to pay for all these progressive gains”? Is simple. The same way the federal government pays for everything.
BY ISSUING THE CURRENCY!!
That is what the federal government does, By law. (as do all sovereign governments that issue their own currency like the USA, Canada, Japan, the UK, China etc but not the European Monetary Union countries like Greece who are destroying their society largely because they don’t issue their own currency and have un-democratized their currency issuance and given it over to a bunch of elite technocrats)
The USA federal government ISSUES THE US DOLLAR!!
Where else could US dollars possibly come from?
The US federal government CANNOT RUN OUT OF US DOLLARS, THEY CANNOT GO BROKE IN US DOLLARS.
THE US FEDS ISSUE THE US DOLLARS!
THE US FEDS DO NOT NEED TO TAX TO SPEND!
THE US FEDS DO NOT NEED TO BORROW TO SPEND!
THE USA FEDERAL DEBT IS SIMPLY AN ACCOUNTING OF ALL THE MONEY THE US GOV. HAS ISSUED MINUS THE AMOUNT IT HAS COLLECTED BACK IN TAXES.
This is simply a fact of how the current money system works.
There are of course many other issues in economics and society (inflation, employment, production, consumption, decision making, class warfare, divide and conquer etc.) but IMHO progressives MUST GET THIS BASIC UNDERSTANDING OF HOW MONEY IN THE CURRENT SYSTEM WORKS.
I highly recommend the following MMT sources
http://www.neweconomicperspectives.org for those interested in
more information, and particularly for people new to this information, to their MMT primer
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/modern-monetary-theory-primer.html or the book
“Modern Money Theory – A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems” by professor Randall Wray available here
http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137539915#otherversion=9781137539908
http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/l-randall-wray Writings of Randall Wray at the Levy Economics Institute.
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/ by economics professor Bill Mitchell
http://moslereconomics.com by Warren Mosler.
A concise and straightforward explanation in video by economics professor Randall Wray ofthe University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KRi9nF8BiA
or Warren Mosler
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AyT9zftNrE
For a longer treatment of money and debt David Graeber’s “Debt The Last 5000 years” may be of interest.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list.
In Solidarity
Yes, for a while it did appear that he favored Trump over Clinton, but he never supported Trump in a positive way. If you go back and read his previous writings during the elections, he was always maintaining that the US elections is turned into a competition between two of the most loathed people among Americans. And he was saying when both sides are detested to this degree, the one who gets more media coverage will be the loser. And that is precisely what happened, isn’t it?!
This man knows what he is talking about. But if you really want to know what is correct and what isn’t, I’m afraid the only way to know that is to go and buy those 10 different economic books and find it out yourself. People like Michael Hudson or others can give us clues, but we can only make our own minds by understanding subjects directly. Although this is true for all scientific subjects, but it is particularly true about human sciences and most particularly about economics. The reason being that, in economics and human sciences, we ourselves are subjects of study. Therefore it is inevitable that there will be biases based on who conducts the study and what vested interests influence it.
Basically what I see these days is a bunch of talking head, celebrities, trying to make a living. This is certainly understandable, but doesn’t it almost completely prevent them from … uh, “speaking truth to power” so to speak, or speaking truth to each other.
Not everyone can be the most brilliant economist, and there is a kind of a bandwagon that Left-leaning economists are jumping to and giving lip service to … the I-work, inequality. Funny, I have followed most of the Leftist media for decades and this inequality idea only seemed to come up around 2008, except that it was out there and a big issue a hundred years ago, and somehow got dumped or lost.
I would like to see more of our favorite talking heads who are speaking from a Left point of view start having to discuss with each other, have conflict, resolve them, and then synthesize something that is relevant and useful for all the people, rather than having everyone have to buy 10 different economic books, read them, and then try to figure it out themselves, which few if any of us lay people are able to do.
The Right, the corporatist, the rich, the capitalists, do this by their very natures, they have one track that leads them in the same direction – selfishness, and power seeking.
The Left is at an inherent disadvantage, and I don’t see anyone talking about that, let alone doing anything about it. The other day on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour podcast, I heard Ralph and Noam Chomsky talking … FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME. How can that by that two towering figures from the Left had never talked, and do not work together. Both of these brilliant people who I admire and respect are billed as famous activists … but what are they doing if everyone is always doing it all alone and it leads to nowhere?
It has been three years that I am following the two very closely and I have learned massively from them.