(1/10) I just finished reading @StephanieKelton's #TheDeficitMyth. It's perhaps the most lucid popular exposition of #MMT theory around, a stick of dynamite in the foundations of deficit-phobia, a wake-up call to the dangers of austerity and a startling reminder of the https://twitter.com/StephanieKelton/status/1231390675951869952

(2/10) huge fiscal space governments have to address climate change, and inequality. I could go on and on. I have one query though: #MMT seems to ignore what I think is an even stronger line than the need for #outsidemoney in the private sector (assuming a closed 2-sector model):

(3/10) the origins of money. The difference between economics and physics is not that economics is fake-science -economics is MUCH harder-, rather, it is a difference in COMPLEXITY and economics is closer to evolutionary biology than it is to physics.

(4/10) A scientific theory must be able to make predictions -not forecasts, but PREDICTIONS-, in the way that Charles Darwin predicted fossils in the Cambrian.

(5/10) Most schools of economics treat economic history with haughty indifference -the fossil record is unimportant to them- and are incapable of predicting the conditions under which money and money-forms emerge. The notion of money as the child of barter is a fiction.

(6/10) The oldest written texts we have are IOUs, not love songs, or prayers, but IOUs, something @davidgraeber discusses in his brilliant book #Debt. In Egypt ( https://www.csus.edu/indiv/h/henryjf/pdfs/egypt.pdf), Mesopotamia & Greece ( https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10355/10843/SemenovaOriMonEva.pdf), etc, the origins of money follow a simple

(7/10) model: rising inequality from an innovation of some kind, a class assumes control and spends money into existence -in the form of IOUs- as a means of obtaining resources, and commands that taxes are paid in the new money -Knapp's #stateacceptation-,

(8/10) thus money is introduced. That little model is powerful and does something a sectoral explanation does not: it links money with the origins and evolution of the state, with innovation -in Egypt, money's origins are linked to the rise of an engineer class who tamed

(9/10) the Nile; in Greece, money's origins are linked to the struggle between the polis and the aristocracy- and with resources and to my mind, is a dynamic model that can be used to discuss modern financial developments.

(10/10) It says something about how money originated, while making a testable prediction that barter theory cannot, without sacrificing the point that society evolved through the state spending. If the ancient states had not spent, we would not be around today.