Macro N Cheese

**After the episode, visit our “Extras” page where you’ll find links to Bill Mitchell’s blog, books, MMT education course, and more. Every episode of this podcast is also accompanied by a full transcript. realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/** Usually when Steve and his guests talk about culture, they’re referring to that of neoliberalism. As Scott Ferguson says, neoliberalism isn’t just e...

Clint Ballinger is an economic geographer, a path he followed in search of answers to what he calls fundamental questions of political economy. Why did the Industrial Revolution occur in England and western Europe? What is the reason for the radically uneven distribution—radically unequal material well-being—around the world? It exists not only between countries, but within countries. As listeners...

** Check out the transcript for this and every episode of Macro N Cheese on the Real Progressives website. This week’s episode looks at using a recently developed economic model application developed by frequent Macro N Cheese guest, Steve Keen. The software is aptly named “Minsky” and Steve Grumbine’s guest, Tyrone Keynes, is an experienced user of the Minsky software modelling tool. Tyrone is a...

**Thank you to our listeners! Can you believe this is our 200th episode? Crazy, right? Well, it wouldn’t have been possible without the efforts of a dedicated team. Our sound editor and engineer, Andy Kennedy, has spent thousands of hours (literally) producing these weekly gems. Then there’s the diligent band of copy editors—Brad Sandler, Jonathan Kadmon, Jay Spencer, and yours truly, Virginia Cot...

Steve talks with Thomas Fazi, journalist/writer/translator/socialist. Many of us know him as co-author, with Bill Mitchell, of Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World . A few weeks ago, we had an episode entitled Trussonomics. It was recorded a few weeks after Liz became Prime Minister, and mere days before she got the boot, making her the shortest-ser...

“Austerity is the best weapon they have to try to convince. And if they can't convince, they can't coerce. So in my book, I say austerity plays with a double strategy: coercion and consensus.” Clara Mattei is the author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity & Paved the Way to Fascism , published this month. Steve Grumbine, who uses the Twitter display name “Austerity is murde...

**Full transcripts of all our episodes are available on the website, where you will also find an “Extras” page with additional resources. realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/ Steve’s guest, Davarian Baldwin, calls himself an urbanist. This affects his prescriptions for reparations in the US, which extend beyond ADOS and beyond individual payments. His bio says he is a historian, cultural c...

“We have to understand neoliberalism as a particular phase of capitalism dominated by US imperialism. So let's start with the last point I mentioned: regime change operation. Any country around the world, any government that tries to have state oversight over the economy opposing neoliberalism was overthrown through regime change.” Ben Norton’s journalism, according to his bio, focuses primarily o...

** Check out the transcript for this and every episode of Macro N Cheese at the Real Progressives website . Grumbine: I follow a lot of Brits on Twitter, and not just regular rank and file activists, but a lot of the actual economists. And the folks that are considered left, very strongly remind me of neoliberals. Wilson: Because they are. [laughter] What we have, you see, is this wonderful thing...

** To donate to the flood relief effort in Pakistan, please visit the Prime Minister’s Flood Relief Fund 2022 How do we unpack a problem like this year’s floods in Pakistan? Where do we place the blame? Steve invited our friend Aqdas Afzal back on the podcast to discuss his recent article, “Collapse of Civilizations.” The article’s title is a cheeky play on Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizati...

Ivan Invernizzi, of Rete MMT Italia and MMT France , returns to Macro N Cheese to bring us up to speed on the Italian political landscape. He and Steve met at the 2nd International MMT conference in NYC in 2018, and he was an early guest on this podcast. The US mainstream media tends to catastrophize the election of right-wing leaders around the world by lumping them all into a single sensational...

The movement for free universal healthcare is under attack. Groups like March for Medicare for All, National Single Payer, and others, have been criticized for not buying into the Democratic Party’s agenda promoting individual state healthcare initiatives. The party wants us to stop pressuring Congress. They tell us to go home. They say there’s more likelihood of success in our statehouses. Well,...

Grumbine: Can we have too much money? Wray: Yes, we surely can. Usually, our problem is that there's too much bank money, and the usual consequence is a financial crisis. Obviously, Steve and his guest are talking about the nation, not their own wallets. In this episode, he welcomes L. Randall Wray to Macro N Cheese for the eighth time to talk about Randy’s new book, "Making Money Work for Us: How...

Cory Doctorow writes when he’s anxious. He has eight books coming out soon. Yep, it’s been a tough couple of years. The number of upcoming books gives us a sense of the wide range of subjects Doctorow concerns himself with. His upcoming Chokepoint Capitalism , co-authored with Rebecca Giblin, is about monopoly, monopsony, and fairness in the creative arts labor market. Cory and Steve return to sev...

Some of the more, um, senior members of the Macro N Cheese team can remember a time when the Democratic Party supported labor and the union movement. Then we came to realize we had it backwards – it's really the Party expecting support from the unions, who made donations, helped with campaigning, and got out the vote. Followers of this podcast are regularly introduced to guests who bring word of a...

When Jakob Feinig speaks of moral economies, he’s talking about we, the people – the currency users – and how we relate to the institutions that issue money, as well as our monetary knowledge and its ability to inform direct action. Needless to say, Modern Monetary Theory is an essential component of this. This week he and Steve discuss both moral economies and “monetary silencing,” a concept that...

**Every episode of Macro N Cheese is accompanied by a full transcript and an “Extras” page of additional resources. Find them at realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/   This week Steve interviews Latasha Holloway, who is running for&...

David Van Deusen, president of the Vermont State Labor Council, AFL-CIO, talks to Steve about their radical ten-point program, adopted in 2019. In the interview, he explains why they were spurred to develop the plan and breaks down what it means in practice as they move away from lobbying and expand their focus on the rank-and-file. This includes training workshops for non-union workers – How to O...

Near the start of this episode, Jason Hickel raises Noam Chomsky’s position that the urgency of the climate crisis is so dire it will have to be dealt with under capitalism. There isn’t time to transition to socialism. Hickel disagrees. Capitalism is incapable of handling the problem. Hickel, an economic anthropologist, begins the interview pointing out the mistaken notion that we have no climate...

We often talk about climate change on this podcast. The IPCC deadline is hanging over our heads like the sword of Damocles. This week Steve talks to David Keith, a professor of both Applied Physics and Applied Policy at Harvard, and author of A Case for Climate Engineering. Climate engineering, a term for solar geoengineering or solar radiation modification, would enable us to alter the Earth's re...

In a recent episode of Macro N Cheese, Steve spoke with a guest about the MMT view of exports as a benefit and imports as a cost. There ensued some disagreement on social media (where else?) This week Steve invited Bill Mitchell to weigh in on the topic. As their discussion develops, this becomes an episode we’d recommend to anyone who is still unclear on the meaning and consequences of foreign tr...

Robert Hockett joins Steve to talk about his latest book, The Citizens’ Ledger: Digitizing Our Money, Democratizing Our Future . The episode is right at home in our archive of interviews around the topics of fintech, digital wallets, cryptocurrency, CBDCs, and privacy. We urge our listeners to look up past episodes featuring Brett Scott and Rohan Grey . Just about everyone acknowledges that digita...

At first glance, HBO’s new documentary series The Anarchists looks like fun. It’s got the sexy circle-A symbol in the title and… Well, at second glance, that’s all it has going for it. The title. If you’re hoping to find the intellectual heirs of Emma Goldman and Bakunin, you’ll be disappointed. These aren’t even the scrappy anarchists of punk rock or the raucous groups waving black banners at dem...

**A transcript is available for this and every episode of the podcast at realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/ where you will also find an Extras page with links to resources related to the episode.** In one of the most exciting pairings we’ve had on this podcast, Michael Hudson and Steve Keen join Steve Grumbine to talk about geopolitics, international production and trade, the climate cri...

Listeners who came of age in the US since 2008 don’t remember a time when “class” was a term only used by politicians - and always with the modifier “middle.” Candidates of both parties assured us of their deep affection for and connection to the middle class. They left it up to us to define what exactly that meant. Unless you associated with leftists, you were more likely to hear “capitalism” spo...