Linkage

The purpose of this white paper is to publicly present the fundamentals of MMT

What is MMT?

MMT began largely a description of Federal Reserve Bank monetary operations, which are best
thought of as debits and credits to accounts as kept by banks, businesses, and individuals.
Warren Mosler independently originated what has been popularized as MMT in 1992. And while
subsequent research has revealed writings of authors who had similar thoughts on some of MMT’s
monetary understandings and insights, including Abba Lerner, George Knapp, Mitchell Innes, Adam
Smith, and former NY Fed chief Beardsley Ruml, MMT is unique in its analysis of monetary
economies, and therefore best considered as its own school of thought.

Two recent papers from York University, from a team led by assistant professor Kinnon MacKinnon, offer a wider sampling. MacKinnon and his team interviewed 28 detransitioners who told them complicated stories of identity evolution, medical complications, and experiences with anti-trans and anti-nonbinary discrimination. Taken together, they suggest ways providers and society as a whole could better support trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people. Spoiler: It’s not by banning care.

Published in PLOS One on Nov. 29, the first paper sought to “qualitatively explore the care experiences and perspectives of individuals who discontinued or reversed their gender transitions.” The second, published in Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity on Nov. 30, took those qualitative findings and attempted to demarcate four discrete subtypes or pathways for detransition.

Of 28 interviewees who answered a call for people in Canada who had shifted or discontinued a transition, 10 were at birth assigned male, and 18 female. They all had negative experiences during their initial transition. But most did not follow the typical sequence that widely shared detransitioner stories follow, of switching genders, then switching back to identifying as cis. A clear majority, 60 percent, had shifted from a binary trans identity when they began transitioning into a nonbinary identity at the time of the interview. By contrast, only six identified as female or a woman, and none identified as male or a man.

Many offices are sitting empty following the rise of working from home, while cities around the world face housing crises. Building new housing is extremely carbon intensive. Could converting unused offices into housing help solve both problems?

Melissa Fisher believed her jobseeker payments would be cut off if she didn’t complete a resilience training course.

So the South Australian-based artist, who has a disability and has been on income support for several years, signed up. She found herself being asked to rate her friends and family, whether God played an important role in her life and if she felt grateful she had enough to eat.

At one point in the four-day course, she was shown pictures of Brad Pitt in a chicken suit to illustrate how people can go from “nothing to something”.

“I found all of it so condescending,” Fisher says of the resilience training run by WISE employment in South Australia.

“They said that who we have in our life is important and surrounding ourselves with successful people will make us successful. If we surround ourselves with unsuccessful people we will be unsuccessful.”

Fisher says she believed the course was part of her mutual obligations which jobseekers are required to undertake otherwise their payments can be suspended. Fisher says she was never told she could choose not to do the course – and other jobseekers across Australia say they also thought the same.

The reported cancellation of Hasan’s show has similarly caused outrage, with left-wing commentators saying that Hasan was both a unique on screen talent and a critical voice on the left and on the topic of Gaza in the sphere of corporate media.

“[MSNBC], make this make sense,” wrote human rights lawyer Noura Erakat. “[Mehdir Hasan]’s program has felt like an oasis on air and more needed than ever. His program with Mark Regev was a whole class on journalistic method. He should be amplified, not shut down.”

“It is bad optics for MSNBC to cancel [Mehdi Hasan]’s show right at a time when he is vocal for human rights in Gaza with the war ongoing,” wrote Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California). “MSNBC owes the public an explanation for this decision. Why would they choose to do this now?”

Victoria should commit to build 60,000 new social housing dwellings by 2034, end the first home owners grant and lobby the federal government to examine tax concessions for investment properties, the state inquiry into the rental and housing affordability crisis has recommended in its final report.

The report stopped short of making any recommendations on rental price regulation, which is a contentious issue between the Greens, who have been campaigning for rent caps, and the government, which has resisted calls.

The 34 recommendations included a call for the government to commit to building 60,000 new social housing dwellings by 2034, with 40,000 of them completed by 2028.

Given that for most Australians their largest asset is their home – or, for some, a portfolio of investment properties – and it is often tied to long‑term financial plans, measures that are even vaguely thought to threaten property values are treated with ‘extreme caution by our politicians’.

It is also difficult to overstate the importance of continually rising house prices to the Australian economy. In 2022, Australia’s ‘big four’ banks – ANZ, CBA, NAB and Westpac — held around $1.87 trillion in home loans. No other country’s banks are as heavily dependent on residential property with housing in Australia having been referred to as ‘the cash cow of the banking sector’.

Also of interest to the Committee throughout this Inquiry was the way in which property is discussed in the media. Outlets such The Age, for example, flipped daily between stories lamenting housing unaffordability and those celebrating strong growth in property prices. Auctions are reported as if they are exciting sporting contests with results celebrated when they ‘soar’ past reserve prices. Similarly, when the Housing Statement was announced in September, the Australian Financial Review warned that the policies risked dampening house prices, valuing rapid growth in house prices over increased affordability. Housing is a human right, and that fact lies at the heart of Inquiries such as this. All Victorians should be able to access safe, secure, quality and affordable housing. The housing choices that people can make are inevitably shaped by their own circumstances, the  broader nature of the housing system, and our social and economic priorities. One question that this Inquiry has faced is whether we want a home ownership society or a landlord society.9 Victoria, along with the rest of the country, is trending towards the latter. As rates of renting increase, so must security of tenure, liveable rental homes and greater consumer protections. But the goal of home ownership should never be out of reach for Victorians.

The intersection of AI hype with that elision of complexity seems to have produced a kind of AI booster fanboy, and they're making personal brands out of convincing people to use AI to automate programming. This is an incredibly bad idea. The hard part of programming is building and maintaining a useful mental model of a complex system. The easy part is writing code. They're positioning this tool as a universal solution, but it's only capable of doing the easy part. And even then, it's not able to do that part reliably. Human engineers will still have to evaluate and review the code that an AI writes. But they'll now have to do it without the benefit of having anyone who understands it. No one can explain it. No one can explain what they were thinking when they wrote it. No one can explain what they expect it to do. Every choice made in writing software is a choice not to do things in a different way. And there will be no one who can explain why they made this choice, and not those others. In part because it wasn't even a decision that was made. It was a probability that was realized.

But it's worse than AI being merely inadequate for software development. Developing that mental model requires learning about the system. We do that by exploring it. We have to interact with it. We manipulate and change the system, then observe how it responds. We do that by performing the easy, simple programing tasks. Delegating that learning work to machines is the tech equivalent of eating our seed corn. That holds true beyond the scope of any team, or project, or even company. Building those mental models is itself a skill that has to be learned. We do that by doing it, there's not another way. As people, and as a profession, we need the early career jobs so that we can learn how to do the later career ones. Giving those learning opportunities to computers instead of people is profoundly myopic.

When we replaced our traditional pattern of development with the Suburban Experiment, there were some unforeseen consequences. Why did we do it, and how can we fix it?

The encomiums have flowed voluminously for Henry Kissinger, and there have been some condemnations too. But even in the latter, little attention has been paid to his efforts to prevent peace from breaking out in the Mideast — efforts which helped cause the 1973 Arab–Israeli War and set in stone the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This underappreciated aspect of Kissinger’s career adds tens of thousands of lives to his body count, which is in the millions.