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Hi Zak,

I'm glad you're open to MMT. Just wanted to point out that the headline to the article that you linked in the phrase, "Modern Monetary Theorists" is misleading, (i.e., "The Economist Who Believes We Should Just Print More Money").

"Printing money" does not add a single dollar to the economy. It just transfers numbers from a balance sheet at the Fed to numbers on little pieces of green paper that you carry around in your pocket.

It nets to zero in the economy.

Money is a unit of account. It's the numbers that's the money, not the paper.

The federal government --- or any government that issues its own currency, for that matter --- creates dollars every time it spends.

Or more precisely,

The federal government creates dollars every time it spends by crediting accounts.

The federal government destroys dollars every time it taxes by debiting accounts.

It's all just keystrokes. No paper necessary.

As an analogy, it's no different than a scorekeeper at a football game. A team gets a touchdown, the scorekeeper adds six points to the scoreboard. The referee then says that there wasn't actually a touchdown. The scorekeeper then removes six points from the scoreboard.

It doesn't matter if the points were recorded digitally on a scoreboard with keystrokes, or recorded with a magic marker on a giant piece of paper.

It's the numbers that's the points, not the medium on which the points are recorded.

And so it is with money.

~ Jason Bessey
On Sunday, July 12, 2020, 06:44:40 PM EDT, Zak Ali <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi Gregg,
Welcome back.

Yesterday, YouTube algorithm "recommended" the following documentary to me titled "Empire of the Ants":
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.youtube.com_watch-3Fv-3Dvt7jGGroF0Q&d=DwIFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=XINSOdH14UPTKjNCaI3m6EIq2YiKquMY1-f5aGECrvA&s=QGBdFiAtpXrXHfQGsefpmon_M_aF8GVQSqXhA7gOwJg&e=

It's fascinating to me how "cooperation" vs. "competition" modules in insects and humans emerged in such complex ways leading to questions like "Could the division of labor in an anthill be driven by the same social dynamics governing the gap between liberals and conservatives?" (see article below):
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__phys.org_news_2020-2D01-2Dants-2Dmen-2Dant-2Dbehavior-2Dmirror.html&d=DwIFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=XINSOdH14UPTKjNCaI3m6EIq2YiKquMY1-f5aGECrvA&s=jGqP6-TlzmGbq_uV-sSlGnNriJ8U4LaDIH02KfW-m2E&e=

In the "empire of ants" documentary, they show two colonies; one with the "other anthill is the enemy" template engage in a week long battle of "murder and mayhem" while the other anhills using "let's cooperate with each other" template turning into a super colony whose "operating system" seems to be superior in many ways.

The more I reflect on this, the less judgement I feel towards people who are using the "other anthill is the enemy" sense-making template.

Having this information from ant colonies, made me think about what templates I use when I try to make sense of the world around me. A recent one came to mind which has to do with MMT (Modern Monetary Theory).
Before I looked into and started seeing merit in arguments made by the Modern Monetary Theorists, I thought Bernie Sanders had no clue "how the economic machine works" so I used the "other anhill is clueless" template and completely ignored him. Now I feel like, I should have taken the time and listened to him at the very listen before completely rejecting his ideas.
My hope is that this TOK community and your peers in the "intellectual deep web" communities will find better, faster and easier paths to reach all the anthills that are using the "other anthill is the enemy" templates and wasting a lot of energy in "competition" while "cooperation" module is at their disposal ready to be deployed.
Look forward to our Zoom meeting tomorrow.
Regards,
Zak Ali

On Sun, Jul 12, 2020 at 7:13 AM Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi TOK List,

I hope this finds you well.

I am back after my week of gluttony and sloth in Vermont with my parents. Fortunately, I was able to swing a few hours south and hang out for a couple of hours with Zak Stein.

I thought I would share that, on a recommendation from Daniel Fraga, I checked out thisshort film by Adam Kingsmith and found much to like about it. I was not aware of Marcuse’s work onEros and Civilization, so that is a bonus right there. In the language of the Unified Metapsychology Framework, this is the Primate-Ecology versus Person-Society problem (or the Animal-Mental versus Cultural-Person dimensional alignment, writ large). Now we need to move from this “two part” problem into the three part, Mind, Culture, Digital. This is the problem of the 5th joint point on the Tree of Knowledge System.

Tying this back to the film, I have long argued that we needed a way to cultivate lives that intertwine love, work and play with meaning. Or, more metaphorically, we need to build global civilizations that can allow us to cultivate our local Gardens all while allowing Gaia to flourish writ large…

Peace,

Gregg

___________________________________________

Gregg Henriques, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Graduate Psychology
216 Johnston Hall
MSC 7401
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
(540) 568-7857 (phone)
(540) 568-4747 (fax)

Be that which enhances dignity and well-being with integrity.

Check out my Theory of Knowledge blog at Psychology Today at:

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.psychologytoday.com_blog_theory-2Dknowledge&d=DwIFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=XINSOdH14UPTKjNCaI3m6EIq2YiKquMY1-f5aGECrvA&s=GJPFGO8NKelOLUtLlcLEhEfX5E9gDqvvgKbGvWO4gQc&e=

Check out my webpage at:

www.gregghenriques.com

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