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> a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry I think you have this the wrong way around. Mainstream economic theory (th

> a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry I think you have this the wrong way around. Mainstream economic theory (the neo-liberal kind) actually leads to the control of government by private capital. What you will see coming out of the top schools (especially Chicago) but many others too is theory that pushes for de-regulation, privatization, free flow of capital, laissez-faire etc. The exact opposite of government control over industry. > no apparent push by economists to promote workers as primary owners of companies for example This is (probably) true, but the reasons are again quite simple and don't involve the state very much. Great concentrations of wealth are built and maintained by keeping capital ownership in as few hands as possible. Since academic economists are often beholden to big capital owners (in one way or another), they will of course promote theories that justify and encourage concentration of ownership, not its dispersal among the workers. > it gets no airplay compared to people pushing branches of Keynesianism or Modern Monetary Theory MMT especially is not at all a mainstream theory. I would say most economists consider it at best "heterodox" and often either don't know much about it or strongly disagree with it.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> MMT especially is not at all a mainstream theory. AFAICT, the descriptive aspects of MMT are widely accepted, if deemphasized in prescriptive contexts, aspects of mainstream economic theory (not just [neo-]Keynesian, but across essentially the whole spectrum of descriptive economics.) The prescriptions that MMT adherents make based on those descriptive aspects are out of line with mainstream prescriptions, which tend to honor what MMT loudly points out (and mainstream economics more quietly acknowledges) is the fiction of the finite public purse.
- leto_ii 6y ago
  Hmm, interesting. Do you have a few references from let's say top five journals that incorporate MMT descriptive aspects? I'm genuinely curious.
- atq2119 6y ago
  Is something descriptive really accepted if it is deemphasized in prescriptive contexts? Take the very basic thing that you mention at the end, which should be absolutely non-controversial: the US government cannot be forced into default. If your prescriptions are just going to ignore that fact, then have you truly accepted it? I'd argue that no, you really haven't. (That doesn't mean you'd have to follow the prescriptions of MMTers necessarily, e.g. the Job Guarantee is certainly not a logically necessary conclusion of the fact that a sovereign government cannot go bankrupt. But your whole framing around government spending and revenue really does need to be centered around this observation, or you're simply bound to fall into fuzzy and incorrect thinking all the time.)
  - roenxi 6y ago
    If I lend the US government enough money to buy a sandwich, and get back only enough money to buy a half-sandwich it really doesn't matter to me whether they technically defaulted or not. I am down half a sandwich. The US government 'can't default' but that is basically word games for a complicated tax where nobody is quite certain who is paying. The government is definitely consuming real resources and unlike a tax it isn't at all obvious who would have gotten those resources had the government not redirected them. I'd rather governments were straightforward and levied taxes to pay for things so we know who is supporting state spending. The conversation really hinges on the semantics of 'default' - in real terms the Government absolutely can default. At some point the country has collapsed, there is nothing left to give (see classic hyperinflation cases) and the government will not make good on its debts. In nominal terms the government can't default but anyone who treats that as useful in their decision making is going to lose out sooner or later when it comes back to real goods and services. I don't want to be one of those people, and I don't want there to be any people like that because it seems dishonest at some level to pretend they aren't losing out. People call US bonds 'risk free' - that is only in nominal terms. In real terms they are actually quite risky. Take on a 30 year treasury bond today and there isn't any certainty how much it will be worth in 2020 dollars as it matures. Is it a likely net win on the sandwich scale? Signs point to no, but it might be. There are risks.
    - atq2119 6y ago
hammock 6y ago
>Great concentrations of wealth are built and maintained by keeping capital ownership in as few hands as possible That's a tautological and zero-sum way to look at it
- leto_ii 6y ago
  The implication was that concentrations of wealth are not a law of nature, but rather an emergent property of how capitalism is set up to be. This idea is not tautological, just a casual relationship. Regarding the 0-sum aspect, I don't know how else you can look at it. Ownership of capital has to follow a certain distribution, which can in turn be more or less egalitarian, depending on how we decide to set the system up. it's however not possible to have both concentrated ownership and co-op style ownership at the same time (for the same company).
  - int_19h 6y ago
    To be more specific, it's all down to how the society understands and enforces property rights. If land and real estate can only be held in usufruct, for example (i.e. if society only protects violation of those rights), then capital cannot be concentrated indefinitely.
pdonis 6y ago
> The exact opposite of government control over industry. Only in the sense of "industry control over government". Which doesn't strike me as any improvement. The true opposite would be "industry has to fend for itself without being able to co-opt government to tilt the playing field in its favor".
- leto_ii 6y ago
  > The true opposite would be "industry has to fend for itself without being able to co-opt government to tilt the playing field in its favor". Sure, good point. However I don't think it's possible or desirable to let industry be completely independent of the state. It seems to me that would lead us right back to our current predicament - power would concentrate and it would start putting pressure on the state.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > power would concentrate and it would start putting pressure on the state The state itself is a concentration of power. Industry wants to co-opt it for that very reason.
    - leto_ii 6y ago
      Not saying that the state is a good thing. It's slightly better than a corporation though, because it's under some sort of democratic control. Ideally though, all concentrations of power should be dismantled.
      - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        I'm not sure that's realistic, with respect to concentrations of power. Whatever power you use to reduce concentrations of power would undoubtedly become quite powerful. I think that it's probably better to attempt to reduce the size of any one concentration of power, and set them all up watching each other.
        6y ago

dragonwriter 6y ago

> MMT especially is not at all a mainstream theory. AFAICT, the descriptive aspects of MMT are widely accepted, if deemphasized in prescriptive contexts, aspects of mainstream economic theory (not just [neo-]Keynesian, but across essentially the whole spectrum of descriptive economics.) The prescriptions that MMT adherents make based on those descriptive aspects are out of line with mainstream prescriptions, which tend to honor what MMT loudly points out (and mainstream economics more quietly acknowledges) is the fiction of the finite public purse.

leto_ii 6y ago
Hmm, interesting. Do you have a few references from let's say top five journals that incorporate MMT descriptive aspects? I'm genuinely curious.
atq2119 6y ago
Is something descriptive really accepted if it is deemphasized in prescriptive contexts? Take the very basic thing that you mention at the end, which should be absolutely non-controversial: the US government cannot be forced into default. If your prescriptions are just going to ignore that fact, then have you truly accepted it? I'd argue that no, you really haven't. (That doesn't mean you'd have to follow the prescriptions of MMTers necessarily, e.g. the Job Guarantee is certainly not a logically necessary conclusion of the fact that a sovereign government cannot go bankrupt. But your whole framing around government spending and revenue really does need to be centered around this observation, or you're simply bound to fall into fuzzy and incorrect thinking all the time.)
- roenxi 6y ago
  If I lend the US government enough money to buy a sandwich, and get back only enough money to buy a half-sandwich it really doesn't matter to me whether they technically defaulted or not. I am down half a sandwich. The US government 'can't default' but that is basically word games for a complicated tax where nobody is quite certain who is paying. The government is definitely consuming real resources and unlike a tax it isn't at all obvious who would have gotten those resources had the government not redirected them. I'd rather governments were straightforward and levied taxes to pay for things so we know who is supporting state spending. The conversation really hinges on the semantics of 'default' - in real terms the Government absolutely can default. At some point the country has collapsed, there is nothing left to give (see classic hyperinflation cases) and the government will not make good on its debts. In nominal terms the government can't default but anyone who treats that as useful in their decision making is going to lose out sooner or later when it comes back to real goods and services. I don't want to be one of those people, and I don't want there to be any people like that because it seems dishonest at some level to pretend they aren't losing out. People call US bonds 'risk free' - that is only in nominal terms. In real terms they are actually quite risky. Take on a 30 year treasury bond today and there isn't any certainty how much it will be worth in 2020 dollars as it matures. Is it a likely net win on the sandwich scale? Signs point to no, but it might be. There are risks.
  - atq2119 6y ago

hammock 6y ago

>Great concentrations of wealth are built and maintained by keeping capital ownership in as few hands as possible That's a tautological and zero-sum way to look at it

leto_ii 6y ago
The implication was that concentrations of wealth are not a law of nature, but rather an emergent property of how capitalism is set up to be. This idea is not tautological, just a casual relationship. Regarding the 0-sum aspect, I don't know how else you can look at it. Ownership of capital has to follow a certain distribution, which can in turn be more or less egalitarian, depending on how we decide to set the system up. it's however not possible to have both concentrated ownership and co-op style ownership at the same time (for the same company).
- int_19h 6y ago
  To be more specific, it's all down to how the society understands and enforces property rights. If land and real estate can only be held in usufruct, for example (i.e. if society only protects violation of those rights), then capital cannot be concentrated indefinitely.

pdonis 6y ago

> The exact opposite of government control over industry. Only in the sense of "industry control over government". Which doesn't strike me as any improvement. The true opposite would be "industry has to fend for itself without being able to co-opt government to tilt the playing field in its favor".

leto_ii 6y ago
> The true opposite would be "industry has to fend for itself without being able to co-opt government to tilt the playing field in its favor". Sure, good point. However I don't think it's possible or desirable to let industry be completely independent of the state. It seems to me that would lead us right back to our current predicament - power would concentrate and it would start putting pressure on the state.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > power would concentrate and it would start putting pressure on the state The state itself is a concentration of power. Industry wants to co-opt it for that very reason.
  - leto_ii 6y ago
    Not saying that the state is a good thing. It's slightly better than a corporation though, because it's under some sort of democratic control. Ideally though, all concentrations of power should be dismantled.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      I'm not sure that's realistic, with respect to concentrations of power. Whatever power you use to reduce concentrations of power would undoubtedly become quite powerful. I think that it's probably better to attempt to reduce the size of any one concentration of power, and set them all up watching each other.
      - 6y ago