Jan 11, 2020
Today I talk with 6th year MMT activist Tony Weston (Twitter/@tonywestonuk). Tony and I met on Twitter soon after I discovered MMT in February of 2018. He is a computer programmer based in the U.K. who created an online multiplayer game similar to Zynga's FarmVille. After realizing that earlier and richer players had a perpetual and dramatic advantage, Tony decided that there were only two possible solutions: To subsidize poorer and newer players with regular infusions of in-game cash, or to create a fairer economy.
Determined to not have to do the former, Tony began to research economics, a topic he says he never before followed or read about. One of the resources he encountered was Warren Mosler's 2010 book, The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy, which introduces the concepts of MMT. You can download it for free, here. Instead of fixing or rewriting the game, Tony decided that it was more important to spend his time and energy spreading the knowledge of MMT.
(You'll also notice the bit of exasperation in my voice at the very start. This interview was my first with someone overseas. After some false starts, we ended doing a Facebook Messenger audio call, with me recording myself using Audacity, and Tony recording himself on his end in England. For whatever reason, neither of us could manage to record both voices. I merged the two tracks together afterwards. Thanks to Tony for the assistance and patience while we figured this out. From now on, I'll be using either a phone call recorder, or an online recorder such as ZenCastr.)
As a final note, thanks to Graham Elwood for the brief snippet used in today's episode. Here is the full video and the report he discusses.
#LearnMMT
For an overview of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) with many reliable sources to learn more, here is a good place to start:
- On the web: My layperson intro with many expert sources listed at the bottom.
- On Twitter: My massive pinned tweet with expert sources and layperson tutorials.
- On Facebook: Follow this podcast :) The pinned post contains the above web-article.
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