To My Readers:
With this post I attempt to resume publication of Political Economy Watch for the first time since October 29 of last year.
The day after I last published I suffered a sharp attack of sciatica. That left me writhing in pain for the next week and threw me off the weekly publishing tempo I had begun last March and which was interrupted in the early fall due to surgery. Though the pain has significantly diminished, it hasn't gone away (and may not).
Summoning the energy and discipline to write nine hundred words on a weekly deadline has therefore become difficult. It's not as if my brain is not functioning. I can still follow my other avocation of handling bug tickets for an open source software project. I can still complete the New York Times crossword puzzle most days. But those activities mostly exploit well-developed pathways in my mind. They don't require new creative thinking; writing an essay does. When I was young, I had to face a blank page in the 1947 Olympia typewriter my grandfather gave me. By my forties I had to face a blank screen in Word Perfect on a PC. Now I have to face an empty page in Vi needing to be massaged before being pasted into the Substack template. For me that's challenging at the best of times, but months-long spells of feeling sub-par really sap one's creative juices.
The Plan for 2024: Two Streams
So what I'm going to do to get some forward momentum is to open up two distinct streams of posts on this blog. The first will be the kind of posts I was doing between March and October 2023: commentaries on developments in the political economy of the United States, with special focus on the political discourse around those developments plays out in mainstream media such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. As before, I'll try to publish such posts on Sunday mornings (U.S. Eastern timezone). I will try my best to do so, but will only post when I feel I have something good enough to share with others.
The Second Stream: The Deficit Myth Study Guide
The second stream of posts will be more of a political economy study guide for you, my readers. One of the most important schools of thought that shapes my thinking and underpins my writing is Modern Monetary Theory (a.k.a. Modern Money Theory, or MMT for short). I have previously taught MMT in adult-education contexts and expect to do so again in the future. I've also participated in online groups studying MMT. What I'd like to do here is to offer readers of Political Economy Watch a way to more familiarize themselves with the concepts of MMT.
If there's one book that's a great starting point to learn about MMT, it's Stephanie Kelton's The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy. Kelton, an economist and professor of public policy at Stony Brook University, published this book in 2020. It's currently available in trade paperback, Kindle and Audible Audiobook formats. If you have not read it already, consider starting to read it now. What I will provide is an online study guide wherein each week I will write a short note providing context for one or two chapters in The Deficit Myth along with a set of study questions for you to test yourself on the content of that week's reading. To distinguish this stream of posts from my original stream, these posts will appear on Saturday mornings rather than Sundays.
To participate in this online, self-study program, get a copy of The Deficit Myth right away and start reading the Introduction ("Bumper Sticker Shock") and Chapter 1 ("Don't Think of a Household"). My first post to the Study Guide will appear on Saturday, January 13, with subsequent posts appearing one week at a time.