#025 Maren Poitras: How I Learned To Love The Government Debt

Friday, 9 February 2024 - 5:30pm to 6:30pm

While Kev is away, Anne is joined by fellow MMT-traveller, Jackson. We discuss a conversation Anne & Kev had with Maren Poitras, director of a film called "Finding the Money", the perfect antidote to "debt hysteria". Finding the Money, follows the trials and tribulations of MMT economists, notably Stephanie Kelton. Maren and Stephanie will be touring Australia with the film during February and March 2024.

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Finding The Money, film tour
tickets here

Shownotes

Maren mentions women economists who are having a positive impact:

Stephanie Kelton, a professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University, and a leading proponent of Modern Monetary Theory, which she popularised in her book, The Deficit Myth. She served as a senior economic advisor to Bernie Sanders's 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, and served as chief economist on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee (Democratic staff) in 2015. She is founder of the blog New Economic Perspectives

Mariana Mazzucato, a professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL). She is best known for her work on the dynamics of technological change, and the role of the public sector in innovation. She has been active in advising governments on innovation and growth policies. She is the author of, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism.

Kate Raworth, a senior associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute and a Professor of Practice at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. She is known for her ecological economics framework, or "doughnut economics", an economic model that identifies the sweet spot between essential human needs and planetary boundaries.

Isabella Weber, a German economist, and assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. According to Wikipedia, in December 2021, an op-ed she published in The Guardian which argued that strategic price controls could help control inflation in bottleneck situations was heavily criticized by economists, making her "the most hated woman in economics" (The New Yorker). Paul Krugman called her "truly stupid", a statement for which he later apologized.

Jackson mentions Claudia Sahm, an American economist, leading the Macroeconomic Research initiative of the Jain Family Institute. Sahm specializes in macroeconomics and household finance. She is best known for the development of the Sahm Rule, a Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) indicator for identifying recessions in real-time.