Jan 21, 2021
Welcome to episode 64 of Activist #MMT. Today I talk with third-year MMT activist Hannah Judson. Hannah was introduced to MMT at a local community college in 2017. Her professor was BJ Unti who introduced both mainstream and MMT concepts and let the class decide for themselves which theory was more convincing. She later discovered that Unti was a student of Stephanie Kelton. Hannah received a decidedly non-MMT undergraduate degree in business from DuPaul University in Chicago.
In September 2019, she impulsively flew out to Long Island, New York in order to attend the MMT conference at Stonybrook University. Despite knowing no one, she ended up being selected as a last-minute replacement to moderate a conference panel. She and her husband now share an apartment with MMTer Nathan Tankus in Queens, New York, and she has just begun an MMT-informed sociology PhD program at Stonybrook. Her hope is to further expand the interdisciplinary reach of the MMT project, which currently centers around law. Her primary interest, however, is the racial-wealth divide in the United States, and more broadly, stratification and inequality. (Stratification being the decisions and actions that cause and result in inequality.)
Hannah describes how she got here from there, through a Zoom wedding in her home state of Washington, Zoom church in Chicago, and 11,000 miles of driving from Washington to New York to Washington to New York… in order to attend a Zoom PhD.
In part two we drastically switch subjects to mental illness and anxiety, and how they are seen through and informed by MMT. Hannah and I both endured traumatic experiences in our childhoods which will remain with us for the rest of our lives. She discusses how she came to terms with this, how she manages it today, and how her Christianity influences her anxieties as well as her politics. I end by sharing my own story, which I will say more about in the introduction to part two.
Now, onto my conversation with Hannah Judson.
Postscript: TikTok
During this conversation, Hannah told me "I'm too young to be a millennial and too old to download TikTok." Then only a few weeks later, she started an (excellent) TikTok channel for The Modern Money Network. I, um, "researched" it and subsequently became addicted to TikTok for music and singing. I now have my own channel dedicated to singing (and a little guitar). (The songs are also shared on Facebook and Twitter.) I'm a classically trained singer. The last music I did was to be in an a cappella group for five years, up until I discovered Bernie Sanders in August of 2015.
Resources
- Website: Why Blue Lives Matter
- Episode 21 of Activist #MMT with Ryan Mathis: There is nothing "natural" about society’s laws
- Gilda's Club Chicago (Zoom church)
#LearnMMT
For an overview of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) with many reliable sources to learn more, here is a good place to start:
- My large set of resources is a gateway to every known academic paper written by those who have developed MMT over the past quarter century, and is framed around my layperson takes. It is essentially a long-form FAQ, addressing many basic concepts and criticisms, and more.
- On Facebook, the pinned post on Modern Monetary for Real Progressives contains a wealth of information.
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