Zipriztin ekonomikoak (13)

(i) DTM: Ellis Winningham

(a) http://elliswinningham.net/

(b) http://elliswinningham.net/index.php/blog/

(c) http://elliswinningham.net/index.php/the-basics/

…

Fundamental Post Keynesian MMT and Simon Wren-Lewis¹

““US Dollars come from the US government. The US Dollar is a free-floating, non-convertible fiat currency. There is no gold nor any other currency to which the US Dollar is pegged. Therefore, the supply of US Dollars available to the US government is always equal to infinity.” This statement is a prerequisite; a basic requirement for members of the general public before they can begin to understand basic MMT concepts and contributions…

… In other words, the current nature of the monetary system allows the federal government many options that are not available to nations such as France, Greece and Spain. If there is no hard financial constraint on government, then there is no need for that government to obtain an income, nor to borrow back its own currency to affect the spending necessary to exercise those options – those options being dependent on the nation’s real resources and not the federal government’s finances.”

(ii) EBZ

One Trillion² Euros Spent & This Is What Draghi Has To Show For It³

“It’s been 16 months since the European Central Bank began its voyage into the unknowable in March 2015, and as The FT notes, this week marks a milestone – it has now purchased over EUR 1 trillion in government (and corporate) bonds since it began QE.

(…)

The trillion euro surge is driving the ECB’s balance sheet up towards The Fed’s…

The big problem is – it’s not helping the real world…

But don’t expect it to stop anytime soon. If the following utterly insane words from another ECB member show…

• *ECB’S NOWOTNY: MON POLICY PROVED `MORE POTENT’ THAN THOUGHT
• *ECB’S NOWOTNY: EUROSYSTEM HAS SHOWN IT CAN ALWAYS DO MORE

That’s just total bullshit…

Simply put – it’s either pure propaganda-driven lies or the people pulling the strings are blinded by faith and aiming for the cognitively dissonant world record.”

(iii) FINLANDIA

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success⁴

“… Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play. All this has led to a continuous stream of foreign delegations making the pilgrimage to Finland to visit schools and talk with the nation’s education experts, and constant coverage in the worldwide media marveling at the Finnish miracle. (…)

“Oh, and there are no private schools in Finland.”

For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what’s called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school.

Instead, the public school system’s teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. (…)

… in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master’s degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country.(…)”

(iv) Karl Marx

“Je ne suis pas marxiste”: Michael Heinrich⁵

““Je ne suis pas marxiste,” stated Marx, rather annoyed, to his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, when the latter reported the doings of French “Marxists.” Engels had circulated this statement numerous times, including in letters to newspapers – definitely for public consumption. Marx’s distance from Marxists is also expressed in other comments. When he stayed in France in 1882, he wrote to Engels that “the ‘Marxistes’ and ‘Anti-Marxistes”’ […] at their respective socialist congresses at Roanne and St-Étienne” had “both done their damnedest to ruin my stay in France.” (MECW 46, p. 339) (…)

… Marx saw himself as a man of science. Capital, which he regarded as “the most terrible missile that has yet been hurled at the heads of the bourgeoisie (landowners included)” (MECW 42, p. 358), he counted among the “scientific attempts to revolutionize science.” (MECW 41, p. 436) The emphasis on “scientific” is Marx’s. And, when Marx wrote in the foreword to the first volume of Capital, “every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome” (MECW 35, p. 11), that was not simply rhetoric. Marx was fully aware of the provisional nature and fallibility of scientific assertions. “De omnibus dubitandum” – “everything is to be doubted” – he wrote as an answer to the question as to his life’s motto in a fashionable questionnaire that his daughter had presented to him. (…)

Marx himself, in any case, did not seek final certainties. He was far more interested in the critical business of undermining certainties in order to open up new spaces for thought and action – in which it’s not immediately clear what the correct result will be.

In contrast to the “Marxism” that Marx rejected, with its identity-defining certainties, this critical, unfinished Marx has an extremely stimulating and subversive effect. Which of his analyses and concepts are useful, what can help to change the world, and what can’t, is not fixed for all time. One will always have to constantly discuss and make new judgements: “De omnibus dubitandum.””