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Against Money, Against the Boss

Money has one face, the face of the boss: In this case, Cyrus McCormick, a strike at whose Reaper Works led to the Haymarket protests that gave us May Day.

I apologize for lack of content on this blog-slash-newsletter lately. Among other excuses, I’ve just been elected chair of the John Jay Economics Department. Many of you know how that goes. A chair is not a boss, they are just the department’s representative with the university, and the person to whom various administrative tasks are delegated. For example, our department will be hiring this year. I don’t decide on who we hire – every full-time faculty member gets an equal vote. But I am the one who has to make sure that all the forms are filled out.

(As an aside for another time, it is worth noting how much of what has been, at least pre-Trump, one of America’s most successful export industries, is run in practice as a bunch of little worker cooperatives.)

One thing I am still making time for is interviews and events for Against Money. I was talking about the book on a podcast just today, a business and finance one as opposed to the more political ones we have mostly been on. It was a great discussion, but at the end the host asked, “OK, though, Mamdani — this guy’s a communist, right?” There are a couple ways one could respond to that. What I said is the same thing I said to a journalist from The Guardian recently: Socialism is a word for much of what municipal governments already do. Governing as a socialist just means doing more of it and better.

That interview isn’t yet up yet. But some other Against Money content is.

First, a very thoughtful review just came out in The American Prospect, by Jeff Sklansky, with the nice headline “The Class Struggle in Your Wallet.” Money is a topic on which people, especially people who might want to review a book like this, have, quite understandably, their own deeply held views, debates they’re deeply invested in; it can be hard to step back and approach things from a different direction. So I appreciate that Sklansky so generously approached the book on its own terms. I was especially pleased that he zeroed in on the magic mirror as a master metaphor for our vision of money. (At one point “The Magic Mirror” was in the running for the book’s title.)

Sklansky’s one big criticism of the book is that we focus too much on conflicting ideas about money, and neglect more concrete political conflicts. It is a fair criticism. That said, there are reasons we wrote the book the way we did: It is a record of our own escape from the fly-bottle of orthodox thinking about money, which we hope others will be able to follow; we wanted a book that could possibly be read in 25 years, as opposed to one tightly linked to the struggles of the moment. But it remains true that there is a different set of questions, the foundational political questions of what is to be done and who is to blame and which side are you on, that the book does not really address.

Or as Sklansky puts it:

Mason and Jayadev derive a more radical social-democratic prescription from Keynes’s diagnosis of the Great Depression than he did. Against Money sparkles with critical lessons to guide progressive fiscal and monetary policy and financial reform today. But to understand why capital’s power to oppress has proven more enduring than Keynes anticipated, this extraordinarily provocative study should be coupled with a searching examination of the class structure of modern money itself.

I agree that the book could have done more of this, though I think it did some — the section on the euro crisis, for instance, is an example of how a more realistic view of money can reveal vectors of power that are hard to see otherwise. But yes, the conscious political effort to (re)establish markets and money as the governing logic of coordination, even as the actual needs of production often point the other way, is an essential part of the story and should have been foregrounded more than it was. That’s something we’ll do better in the next project, I hope.

Doug Henwood makes a somewhat similar critique towards the end of our interview on his excellent radio show/podcast Behind the News. “I’m very fond of this Antonio Negri quote, ‘Money has one face, that of the boss’,” Doug says. “You play with concepts like that, but then often turn away, and find non-monetary ways of living hidden amidst the getting and spending. Your conclusion has us stepping out of the getting and spending world, and into the sunshine. That all seems a little too easy. There’s not a lot of politics in the book, in terms of the exercise of power and challenging power. So what about the politics of money?”

One point of the book is that it may be easier than we think! Or at least, that the biggest difficulties are not where we think they are.

When we talk about “the economy” at a high level of abstraction, we often speak of a”market economy” or a “capitalist economy,” as if the whole world of production was organized on a single principle. This is the case whether we draw our abstractions from textbook economics or the Marxist tradition. But when we take a more fine-grained look at the ways production is actually organized, we see a great many areas where the pursuit of profit is not the motivator, and even more where activity is not organized through markets and prices. Public schools (and academic departments), libraries, courts, families, churches and militaries are all things that exist in the world we live in. Wherever production involves specialized expertise, professional norms and standards play an essential organizing role. And even for-profit corporations are internally planned economies — hierarchical and often despotic, yes, but not at all markets.

What has to be overcome, then, is not so much the logic of money itself, but rather the political power, the capacity for organized violence, that is exercised in the name of, and legitimized by, money and property.

Again, the lines of authority within production seldom have anything to do with property rights. You probably have a job, or at least have had one. How does your boss exercise authority over you? Almost certainly, it’s because of a position they occupy within some formal organization, not because of something they personally own. Ownership is the language in which the hierarchy is justified and understood. But it is not the organizing principle of the workplace.

As Marx argues so powerfully in Chapter 13 of Capital, the gains of modern industry have come through cooperation between workers on a vastly larger scale than in previous societies. The surplus that is claimed by capital comes from organized human cooperation; capital ownership is simply the way positions in this immense division of labor are assigned. Money is not organizing production, it is a badge or emblem of authority within the social bodies through which production takes place. So-called “capital markets” don’t allocate investment, and “capital flows” don’t involve movement of tools and machines; in both cases, what is involved is tradable claims to authority over production. Or as Marx puts it, management of industry is a function of capital ownership only in the same way “as in feudal times, the functions of general and judge were attributes of landed property.”

The point is that we systematically misperceive organized human cooperation, and the essentially political hierarchies that govern it, as a system of market exchanges of commodities. What we are trying to do in the book is the same thing, in my mind at least, that Marx was trying to do — to escape “the bewitched, distorted, and upside-down world haunted by Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre” and see the concrete human relationships and political choices hidden behind seemingly objective economic categories.

So one answer to Doug’s question, it seems to me, is that clarifying the limited the role of money is in the organization of production is an important preliminary step to challenging the tyranny exercised in its name. And as Marx also emphasized, a meaningful socialist politics can only be built on tendencies and forms of cooperation that already exist in the society we live in. So, again, to me, seeing those non-monetary ways of living already around us is an essential part of a project to systematically expand them.

I admit that we spend more time on the first half of this argument than the second, on clearing away the mystifications than on where we go afterward. It is clear in my mind that the argument we make about GDP, the interest rate and so on are steps toward a larger vision of social transformation, but it might not be as clear to readers of the book. And this is a limitation. But on the other hand, I also think of another quote that Doug is fond of, from Adorno, that “The demand for positive proposals is like the demand for papers from the police.” Yes, it is true, as the man said, that the goal is not just to understand the world but to change it. But one does sometimes need to first step back and think carefully about how to think about things. The demand to move on to the practical politics must sometimes be, if not refused, at least deferred.

Anyway, this exchange was just the last part of the conversation — the rest of it was a wide-ranging and enjoyable discussion of the book with someone who understands its subject matter as well as anyone. I say this about everything I share, but in this case especially, please do give it a listen. And then stick around for the stimulating conversation with Moira Weigel about the Right and theory that follows it, where you will learn that Palantir CEO Alex Karp got into the automated surveillance business only after writing a dissertation on Adorno.

We also had a good discussion of the book on the New Books Network. One nice thing about them is that they go through a book chapter by chapter, inviting you to summarize each one. I’d never heard of them before, but they seem to put up a dozen episodes a day, on a wide range of interesting-looking books. There are so many podcasts! There’s a funny bit late in the show The Good Place where the angels, since they no longer admitting anyone to heaven, turn out to be passing their time listening to podcasts. Which makes sense — who else could follow all of them?

I was also recently gave a virtual talk to a group from the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Young Scholars Initiative. This was for part of a conference on “Money as If Finance Mattered,” and features a whole bunch of very interesting scholars. (YSI consistently puts together very good events, in my experience.) My own talk was about why debates about monetary neutrality matter, and the larger, and often unrecognized, implications if we take the non-neutrality of money seriously.

Finally, Arjun and I had a great discussion of the book with the Polycrisis book club. Polycrisis is Tim Sahay’s and Kate McKenzie’s newish climate vertical at Phenomenal World. Polycrisis prints a ton of interesting stuff on the intersection of climate with broader economic and political questions; I definitely recommend reading it. (You should also be following Tim’s epic threads on Bluesky.) One nice thing about this conversation was that it gave us a chance to get into the significance of our thinking about money for climate questions, something which we initially planned to spend a chapter on in the book but ultimately had to drop.

More broadly, the growing Phenomenal World media empire is one of the most exciting things going on in leftwing media these days — it occupies a rare and vital niche of offering space for scholars to make long and rigorous but politically engaged arguments for a broad non-specialist audience. In some ways, arguably, it’s the closest US equivalent to New Left Review and its Sidecar blog — a model that a lot of other people have tried to replicate less successfully. It’s certainly the most exciting new outlet for the kind of writing I’m interested in that has come along in the past few years.

I feel obliged to mention here that Phenomenal World founding editor Jack Gross was briefly student in the economics MA program here at John Jay. Does everyone who studies economics at John Jay go on to found a major new online journal? Well no; but a remarkably high proportion end up doing something similarly impressive. Admissions, unfortunately, are closed for this year. But please do spread the word about us to people who might think about applying in the future.

At Vox, a Conversation on Rent Control

(I had a long conversation yesterday with Eric Levitz of Vox about the New York City rent freeze and the economics of rent regulation. I have posted the interview below just as it appeared there, for my archives and in case people want to read it without dealing with the paywall.)

An economist makes the case for Zohran Mamdani’s rent freeze

A new look at an issue that frequently divides voter and experts.

by Eric Levitz July 7, 2026 at 6:00 AM EDT

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As America’s housing crisis deepens, policymakers are increasingly turning to an old idea for improving affordability: making large rent increases illegal.

In recent years. Oregon, Washington, and California have enacted statewide rent controls. In 2024, the Biden administration floated a nationwide cap on rent increases for large buildings. And last month, New York’s Rent Guidelines Board approved a two-year rent freeze on the city’s roughly 1 million stabilized units, fulfilling one of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s signature campaign promises.

While rent control has long had some appeal to voters, it has historically provoked consternation among economists. In one 2012 survey, just 2 percent of economists agreed with the statement that local rent regulations “had a positive impact over the past three decades on the amount and quality of broadly affordable rental housing.”

The reasoning behind such skepticism is simple: When you make it less profitable to provide rental housing, people produce less of it. As a result, rent control reduces the supply of housing — and thus tends to make cities less affordable in the long run.

But this orthodoxy may soon be overturned – or so argues J.W. Mason, chair of the economics department at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a senior fellow at Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive think tank.

In Mason’s view, the evidence that rent regulations discourage construction has been widely overstated: When designed well — and paired with zoning reforms — rent controls can protect tenants from displacement without reducing the long-term supply of housing.

We spoke this week about the case for (and against) rent control in general and New York City’s policies in particular. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.

Among mainstream economists, conventional wisdom holds that rent control measures are misguided, partly on the grounds that they reduce the long-term supply of housing. In your view, what does that analysis get wrong?

When we talk about rent regulation, we’re typically talking about markets where there are already very substantial constraints on housing supply. Nobody is trying to pass rent regulation in exurban Texas or the Atlanta suburbs, where you have a lot of new housing construction.

Where it’s relatively easy to build housing, rents are going to be closely tied to the cost of building and operating new housing because, if you charge a lot more than that, then you create an opportunity for competitors.

The markets where you have rent regulation are markets like New York City, San Francisco, and a lot of European cities — places where there’s already really hard constraints on the capacity to build new housing. And in cases like that, where supply is already constrained by land use rules or just by an absolute scarcity of buildable land or by other factors, you’re not going to get any additional limitation on supply from rent regulation.

In that context, owners of existing housing collect rents in the broad, economic sense — income that doesn’t derive from any contribution they’ve made to production, but merely from others’ inability to build. Under those conditions, the only thing rent regulation does is redistribute some of that economic rent from property owners to tenants.

Most critics of rent control oppose restrictive zoning too. So, I think they might say that we should focus on ending the conditions that allow landlords to extract economic rents in the first place, rather than on redistributing them.

There’s an argument that, if we could achieve deep supply-side improvements in housing, we wouldn’t need rent regulation to the extent that we currently do. And I think that’s a perfectly reasonable argument. But it does not do any good for tenants who are facing displacement today. The fact that you have a different long-term goal does not remove the need for dealing with the short-term problem.

And there are good reasons to think that rent regulation is desirable, even if we think the real problem is on the supply side. For one, I think the politics of dealing with supply issues are much easier if you also have rent regulation. A lot of opposition to addressing supply-side problems is a perception that if you get new development, then that’s going to lead to displacement of people in the areas where development is taking place.

We can debate how true that is. But it’s a very deeply held perception. So, to the extent that you can offer real security to existing tenants, you remove one of the big sources of public opposition to supply-side measures: You don’t need to oppose removing restrictions on new housing because you are locked in. You are safe. Your landlord cannot kick you out to get somebody higher-paying in.

And honestly, I think that politics is very clear here in New York. I think that you would not have gotten the City of Yes land-use reforms, or the zoning reforms that passed on the ballot initiatives this past year, or a progressive like Zohran Mamdani coming out in favor of supply-side measures to increase housing production, if we had not strengthened the rent laws back in 2019.

Putting the politics to one side, do you think there is any tension between restricting rents and increasing construction? Say a city rolls back some of its restrictions on homebuilding, and new construction stops being effectively capped by zoning rules. If that city adopts rent controls, will that reduce the supply of housing at the margin? Or is that supposed tradeoff entirely illusory, in your view?

There’s no deterrent effect to many rent regulations, including those in New York City. Obviously, you can hypothetically imagine a much more rigorous form of rent control that could discourage new construction. I’m not going to say that it is impossible for that to happen. I think that we’re just very far from that point.

This is largely because new construction is typically exempt from rent control. In New York City, you are only required to comply with rent regulations if your building is more than 50 years old. And developers aren’t deciding whether to build based on how much rent a project will yield 50 years in the future.

The longevity of housing just makes it different from other goods. People often say, “If you impose a hard cap on milk prices, people will find it less worthwhile to produce milk. And we’re going to have shortages of milk in the stores.” We can debate whether that’s always true. But it’s a reasonable argument, since milk is consumed shortly after it’s produced. So your decision to produce more milk really is based on the price that you can get for that milk today.

But housing is at the opposite extreme. The median building in New York is 80 years old. When that housing was first produced, the price it’s going for today was not a factor.

Now, I should add that in New York City, the buildings with the highest rates of rent regulation are actually newer buildings. But that’s because developers voluntarily opt into the rent regulation system, as a condition of getting tax subsidies. At that point, clearly you’re not having a negative effect on supply when this is a voluntary decision.

Is that necessarily true? In theory, the tax subsidies are supposed to encourage housing investment. And developers weigh the benefit of those subsidies against their costs: If you accept them, you need to provide some units at below-market rates. So, if New York City makes providing rent-stabilized units less profitable — by freezing rents — then don’t the subsidies become less valuable? And wouldn’t that theoretically make investors slightly less inclined to fund new housing, all else equal?

Well, we’re seeing more new housing constructed in New York City right now than we’ve seen in many decades. So clearly something is working. And maybe what’s working is just that incomes are rising, that demand for housing in the city is rising.

But in my opinion, the tax abatements are badly structured. I really would not support housing development that way. But a huge fraction of new housing that gets built in the city uses these tax credits. So I think clearly they’re attractive to developers. Clearly, it’s a worthwhile trade-off from their point of view.

For critics of rent control, one study looms especially large: In 2018, a team of Stanford economists examined the impact of San Francisco’s rent control expansion in the 1990s. And they found that the policy led to a 15 percent reduction in the rental housing supply, which pushed up rents in the city by 5.1 percent. But in my understanding, you think the implications of that research are widely misinterpreted.

Yeah. I think that’s really a study about poor regulatory design. What it shows is: If you impose strict rent regulations but you don’t restrict people’s ability to convert rental properties to other uses, that may encourage landlords to convert rental housing into condos.

In the study, rental housing supply did not fall because of a decline in new construction. It fell because of condo conversions. And that distinction is important. If you have rental housing that’s converted to condos, that’s not reducing the overall supply of housing, but only that of rental housing. And it’s not necessarily increasing the cost of housing: It may be increasing market rents in the unregulated sector, but decreasing the cost of condos for condo buyers.

In any case, a well-designed rent regulation, like New York City’s 2019 reforms, can simply disallow people from moving housing out of the rental market in that way.

Many have argued that rent stabilization in general and New York City’s 2019 reforms in particular have negatively impacted the quality of the housing stock. Specifically, the argument is that landlords respond to rent restrictions by cutting back on maintenance. Is that a serious risk?

Of all of the concerns that you’ve raised, that is the most legitimate. I don’t think that we’re really seeing that yet. If anything, we’re seeing a reduction in a number of units that seem to have severe maintenance problems in New York. But you know, some people think we should not just have a rent freeze here, but a rent rollback. So, you roll back rents by five, 10, 15, 20, 25 percent, you’ll eventually reach a point at which you have real problems with building owners not doing basic maintenance and buildings falling into disrepair.

I’m not sure what the number is. Clearly there is a number where that happens. But I think we’re a very long way away from that. The vast majority of buildings are renting for much more than their operating and maintenance costs. The Rent Guidelines Board does studies. They suggest that the median margin is on the order of 40 or 50 percent.

As you’ve written, there is a minority of stabilized buildings in which maintenance and operating costs already exceed their total rents. But you attribute that primarily to the poverty of such buildings’ tenants, rather than to excessive restrictions on market rents?

I think that’s generally the case. There’s a sector of nonprofit-owned buildings, which tend to be the ones with the lowest rents and the lowest-income tenants. And in many cases, those buildings do face real problems with maintenance and upkeep. But they’re often not increasing rents even by the regulated amount, since tenants in these places simply can’t afford to pay more. In those cases, I think at some point you need either targeted subsidies or a change in ownership. But this is a very small fringe of buildings.

To name one last criticism of rent control: Some economists argue that it promotes an inefficient allocation of housing. The argument being: If you let people pay a below-market rent — on the condition that they don’t move — then you’re encouraging them to stay in place. And this leads to things like, for example, empty-nesters continuing to occupy three-bedroom apartments, which would have more utility for younger families.

I think we should recognize that there is a legitimate social interest in saying: Somebody who’s lived in an apartment for 15 years has a right to remain there, even if their landlord decides they could get a higher income by renting to somebody else. I think that’s a perfectly reasonable social goal.

And I think doing that actually makes the housing market more flexible and efficient. Why? Because it means that there’s less pressure to become a homeowner in order to get that security. Right now, in most markets, if you want security of tenure, the only way to get it is through ownership.

And ownership really locks you in. The transaction costs from buying and selling a house are very large. And obviously, in many cases, you get a financial risk, since a house is your main form of savings. If you sell at the wrong time, you lose a lot of money. So we get people who are locked into houses. They don’t have the same degree of geographic mobility. They can’t move to where the job opportunities are better. They stay in a big house even after their children are grown, which would really be better used by a younger family. If we give more security of tenure to renters, more people will choose to rent, and we’ll have actually, I think, a more flexible and efficient housing market.

At John Jay, We Study Economics to Change the World

Last week, the Rent Guidelines Board voted for a freeze on the rent for New York City’s one million rent-regulated apartments, fulfilling one of Mayor Mamdani’s defining campaign promises.

There has been plenty of discussion of the decision, both supportive and critical. But there’s one aspect of it, of particular interest to me, that has not been mentioned: Two out of the mayor’s six appointees to the board are recent graduates of the John Jay MA program in economics, where I teach.

I’m very proud of Sina Sinai and Lauren Melodia, who I know carefully studied the evidence and considered the full range of options before voting for the freeze. Lauren is also doing important work as the Director of Economic and Fiscal Policy at the Center for New York City Affairs, where she is producing a great deal of valuable research, most recently on working conditions in childcare. She’s recently been joined by David Lee, another John Jay graduate, who formerly worked as Legislative Director for New York Assemblymember Ron Kim and is now writing about fiscal policy at the Center.

Meanwhile on the rent regulation front, Anisha Steephen, a current student at John Jay, just released a major report from the Roosevelt Institute on rent regulation as financial regulation, which I hope to be writing more about soon.

This is what students from the John Jay economics program do. For a small program that’s existed for less than ten years, we have an impressive number of students out in the world contributing to progressive political projects.

Also in the housing space, consider Paul Williams. After finishing his MA with us a few years ago, he established the Center for Public Enterprise, where he now has a dozen staff, and has done as much as anyone to make the case that local government can be a major investor in housing, as well as in energy and other areas. This is a critical part of the both-and approach — boost supply and protect tenants — that defines the Mamdani agenda on housing.

Other current and former John Jay MA students include policy staff for socialist elected officials like State Senator Julia Salazar and former Representative Jamaal Bowman; the legislative director for the UAW; the chief of staff for former New York City Councilmember Carlina Rivera and State Senator Kristen Gonzalez; and analysts and researchers at various government agencies, including several at the Bureau of labor Statistics. Journalists like Aída Chavez (of The Intercept and The Nation) and Kate Aronoff (of The New Republic, and author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal) were also students here. Jack Gross, founder of the outstanding web journal Phenomenal World, and Nathan Tankus, of the essential newsletter Notes on the Crises, were also briefly students here. (Neither got degrees, but the work and the community matter more than the credential.)

Why am I sharing this? Is it just to brag? Well, partially. I am very proud of what we’ve done with this program over the past decade, and of the students who have passed through it. And to update Hillel, if you don’t talk about your own work, who will talk about it?

But there’s also a more specific and timely reason: For the next two weeks, we are still accepting applications for Fall 2026. And I suspect that readers of this blog must know a few young (or not so young) people interested in studying heterodox economics at a public university in New York City.

If you do know someone who might fit that description, here is the pitch.

Unlike most economics programs, John Jay is unapologetically committed to a progressive, policy-oriented approach, and to the heterodox traditions of Marxian, Keynesian and feminist economics. Our students and faculty see the study of economics both as an end in itself and as a way of contributing to the most pressing struggles in our society.

While many of ours students take up roles in politics, advocacy, journalism and policy research (like on the Rent Guidelines Board) many others continue on to PhD programs. In one recent year, we had an entering class of 15 and eight students who went on to PhD programs, a proportion I suspect very few other MA programs in the country could match, even at much more prestigious institutions.

John Jay College is located at 59th St. and 10th Ave., near Columbus Circle in the heart of Manhattan. All classes in the MA program meet in person one day a week in the evening. Most students take three classes per semester and finish the program in two years, but there is no penalty for going at a different pace.

For anyone who has lived in New York State for at least one year as of September, full-time tuition is $5,545 per semester. This is pro-rated for those taking fewer classes, so the total cost for the program is approximately $22,000 regardless of the time over which it is completed. (This is less than a quarter the tuition at many comparable programs.) For non-resident full time students tuition is somewhat higher, but still cheap compared with most graduate programs.

There’s an online application here. Only the statement of purpose and transcript is required by July 15; recommendation letters can come in later.

There is no requirement to have previously studied economics; our students come from a wide range of backgrounds and many have undergraduate degrees in the humanities, physical sciences or other fields. We are less interested in what classes people have taken than in their intellectual curiosity, a willingness to work hard, and a commitment to using economics training to help change the world.

Does coming to John Jay guarantee that you’ll play a leading role in building municipal socialism? Obviously not. But based on our track record, it does seem to improve the odds.

Responses to Against Money

The other day, Laura and I were standing on the subway platform, on our way to see Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters¹, when a young man walked up to us. Well, up to me. “Are you the author of this book,” he asked; he had a copy of Against Money. I said that I was, and asked him if he’d read much of it. Two chapters in so far, he said; he used to follow me on Twitter; he had a pen if I could sign it.

I feel like this is an experience authors of academic books don’t get to have very often. Though I suppose it’s more likely than most places in Park Slope.

I had another nice experience at a reading at Pilsen Community Books in Chicago, a lovely little collectively-owned bookstore I had never been to before. Not a lot of people showed up, but Gabe Winant and I had a good discussion with those who were there. One person in the audience introduced himself as an organizer for UNITE-HERE. We had a good conversation about what motivates workers to join unions, which, today, is practically a matter of defying a totalitarian surveillance state. It’s not mainly about pay, we agreed, it’s about self-respect; or as an organizer I worked with years ago put it, it’s the one’s chance in someone’s life to say “Fuck you” to their boss.

Anyway the discussion went on and toward the end of it a young man in the back asked the question people always ask: ok, but what can I do? What is there to do? I had some answers; Gabe had some better ones, but still not fully satisfactory. Afterwards the young man came up to talk to us. So did the union organizer: What do you do for a living, he asked him. “Oh, well, I just quit my old job” the young guy said. “So, how would you like to work in a hotel?” Afterward they were adjourning to a coffee shop nearby. If the event results in that guy becoming a salt for HERE, then I would say it was an evening well spent.

There are some other responses to Against Money that I am also eager to share.

Our first two reviews are out. One, in Jacobin, is by Mona Ali, whose scholarship on international finance and power I’ve long admired. The second is in Reuters, by Jon Sindreu. Jon is someone I’ve interacted with online for a number of years. He’s a journalist professionally; despite (or because of) that, I feel like he is more in tune with Arjun’s and my particular Keynesian vision than almost any economist I know.

Both reviews are insightful and generous and thoughtful – exactly the kinds of reactions to the book I would have hoped for. One thing I particularly appreciated about both of them is that they don’t just respond to what is in the book, but take its core idea — the difference between money -world with its own internal logic, and the world of productive activity that it interacts with but is distinct from — and carry it in new directions. I think it reflects well on the usefulness of this perspective that they are both able to apply it to other questions that we might have discussed in the book but did not.

Both of them highlight global imbalances as an area where the conflation of money payments with material things is especially pervasive. At the aggregate level, “saving” is just an accounting residual, the difference between total incomes generated from production and consumption spending. As Keynes long ago pointed out, saving is never a constraint at the macro level; any change in investment spending (or the government fiscal balance or the trade balance) mechanically generates an equal change in aggregate saving. Mistaking this accounting category for a quasi-physical substance that can move from place to place — a misapprehension that is ubiquitous in discussion of international trade and finance — leads to all sorts of wrong conclusions, like the idea that financial conditions in the United States are a function of our trade balance with China.

Another area Mona’s review points toward is the idea of degrowth. There is a longstanding desire among economists to regard measures like GDP as reflecting in some sense human wellbeing or happiness, an impulse we criticize at length in the book. But there is a somewhat analogous tendency on the part of some environmentalists to see GDP as a measure of physical throughput or real resource use, so that decarbonization and other sustainability goals necessarily imply a lower path for GDP. The original outline for the book had a chapter called “Planet Money and Planet Earth,” which did not make it in. But we would have argued, as Mona suggests, that to think clearly about the economy and the environment, we need to give up on the idea of a single scalar and turn toward more granular, physical measures, like say, to use her example, the area of tree coverage.

Among other things recognizing money as autonomous and self-referential change the way we think about the productive side of the economy. (This is something Arjun and I have written about elsewhere, but also didn’t get into this book; maybe the next one.)

The view that you get from an economics textbook is that output is effectively a homogeneous substance merging from a production function — a certain quantity of labor and capital goes in one side, and a certain amount of stuff comes out the other. This is an example of seeing concrete reality in the image of money, which really is homogenous — the equivalence of one unit of money to any other unit of money is one of its defining characteristics.

But in reality, production consists of all kinds of complicated forms of specialized cooperation between people; changing what people are making or the conditions under which they make it involves frictions which grow more severe the faster the changes must be made. We may be able to ignore this in the case of gradual, incremental changes in production, and just say that the next unit of spending results in the next most valuable thing that can be produced. In that case, we can describe the system in terms of a level of spending and a corresponding level of aggregate output. But as soon as the changes get larger or faster, the frictions imposed by the real-world heterogeneity and embeddedness of production become impossible to ignore.

As Sindreu highlights in his review, the conflict between the money-like vision of production and its concrete social reality has come more sharply into view in recent years.

Take the Covid 19 pandemic. Governments had no trouble conjuring $11 trillion for fiscal stimulus. Yet most of the money went to keeping the economy humming, with only about a tenth overall going to the health sector. No amount of paper wealth could procure nurses, masks, hospital beds and vaccines in time to make a difference to the virus’ early spread. Consider also the energy shocks of 2022 and this year, U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade spats, the AI revolution and the war in Ukraine. The relevant metrics in these cases have been barrels of oil, critical minerals, computing power and stockpiles of ammunition. A larger GDP helps fund such purchases, but doesn’t necessarily translate into a greater capacity to build or procure them when they’re actually needed.

To me, an interesting aspect of this is the way it challenges the sort of Keynesian macroeconomics that I teach as well as the standard production-function view. The high ground on which retreating Keynesians made their last stand a generation ago was that short-term fluctuations in activity are the result of shifts in the volume of spending, not the productive capacity of the economy. When output falls in a recession or depression, it’s because something has reduced the capacity to make money payments, not the capacity for real production. The alternative, advancing from the freshwater redoubts of Chicago and Minnesota and Rochester, was the “real business cycle” view — that scarcity and allocation are the only economic problems at the macro as well as the micro level, in the short run as well as the long. For people like me, rejecting this view was the starting point for our engagement with macroeconomic theory.

And yet … wasn’t the pandemic downturn a kind of real business cycle? Thanks to the fiscal response (in the US at least), the flow of money payments was not interrupted. The loss of employment and output was precisely due to a sudden loss of capacity for real productive activity.

As Sindreu stresses, the possibility of disruption on either side — in the web of money payments or in the concrete activity of production — reinforces the need to maintain the conceptual distinction between them. The two cases are very different! What is harder to say is whether the pandemic and subsequent disruptions were a one-off; or whether they were a harbinger of future and especially climate related disruptions to the supply side, as Isabella Weber has suggested; or if they should lead us to rethink historical fluctuations as well. It’s not an easy question! For my part, what I still say in the classroom is: “business cycles are always the result of changes in demand … except for the pandemic.”

One more example: the importance of distinguishing between real and financial provision for the future. At an individual level, they are equivalent: If I want to eat in retirement, the way I provide for that is by amassing claims against society in some financial form. But this does not carry over to aggregate level. Many economists, notes Sindreu, think that funded pension schemes, which back promises to retirees with a pot of financial assets, are more sustainable than pay-as-you-go scheme.

but they’re wrong. … If higher measured wealth doesn’t map onto more physical production in the future…, the ageing problem remains unsolved: while an individual retiree may be able to run down assets to boost consumption, society as a whole will still ⁠need enough workers to produce the goods and services demanded.

Here as elsewhere, the problem is that from the point of view of the individual participant in the system, the mapping of money payments on real things is an objective fact: If I pay for so much more of this, I will have to accept less of that. But at the level of the system as a whole, it is not.

Of course you don’t need to read Against Money to observe that GDP is as fetishized by degrowth as by growth for its own sake, or to note that employing people to plant trees boosts measured output and employment just as much as employing people to cut them down. You don’t need to read Against Money to understand that a disruption to production like the pandemic is quite different from the financially-mediated falls in demand of other recessions, or to see that the meals eaten by tomorrow’s retirees must be cooked by tomorrow’s workers, regardless of what is in the Social Security trust fund.

What I hope the book contributes, is to show how these points are connected — that there is a larger worldview implicated in them. Our goal was to bring into light the ideas about money-world and its relationship to concrete production and other social domains, that are implicit in various debates but seldom foregrounded.

So, for example, rejecting a hard tradeoff between decarbonization and meeting people’s immediate material needs should change the way you think about global imbalances. Or — to take another example offered by Sindreu — if you see the strong element of conscious planning driving investment data centers in the US and green energy in China, this awareness of finance as planning should put you on guard against attempts to disguise the actions of the Bank of England as the objective judgement of decentralized bond markets.

Based on the range of fascinating questions that both Mona Ali and Jon Sindreu were able to connect to the arguments of the book, I think we had some success with this. The kinds of issues they brought up point in exactly the directions that we hoped conversations around the book might go. Along with the young people and union activists, these are the readers we were hoping for.

A few other bits of Against Money content.

Arjun was on the “This Is Hell” podcast, with Chuck Mertz, which also airs on WNUR 89.3FM Chicago and Lumpen Radio. I’m especially tickled by the latter, since I was friends with Ed Marszewski and the Lumpen crowd back in the 1990s, and used to hang out at the Marszewski family bar in Bridgeport.

I was on UpFront on KPFA for a 45-minute interview, which is very generous for radio. (The interview itself starts about 12 minutes in.) Brian Edwards-Tiekert of UpFront is a dream interviewer — he had read the book deeply, summarized its key arguments better than I could, and asked thoughtful questions that connected these more abstract debates to the real world debates that are why we care about them.

Finally, I feel compelled to share this review from Amazon. Not just because it’s our first five-star review (though one might pause to consider how the motivating power of prestige and recognition points to the limits of money as a coordination device). But mainly because verified purchaser MudHen so clearly gets what we were trying to do:

Since everything is priced in money, it is all too easy to think, for example, that an object priced at $50,000 has $50,000 of “value” in it somewhere. The equation of price and value simultaneously reifies money (making it a commodity) and casts a veil over the entire material world. This causes us to confuse money and things. That confusion is the bedrock foundation of modern (marginal utility) economics.

Money-is-credit-is-debt points to an end to capitalism. Eventually the entire world is commodified and money is left just valorizing itself in an M-M1 loop which becomes increasingly divorced from use value. At some point, this becomes so ridiculous that everyone can see the problem: uses values are no longer increasing, while nominal (money) wealth is skyrocketing. The Americans are bonkers for their stock market, which is increasingly just a debt (M-M1) financial loop. As the country falls apart, it will become astonishing “wealthy” — and tens of millions of people will slide into functional poverty.

The penalty for confusing money and things is severe, but this book is hopeful. It may not be a matter of envisioning an alternative to capitalism (the hard problem of Jameson/Fisher), so much as the simple realization that most of our growth today is merely financial (number go up). To improve life for everyone, we will have to look beyond money.

Yes, that’s it. The road to a freer, more democratic and egalitarian society doesn’t involve redistributing money claims, but recognizing and building on the ways in which those claims are already and increasingly irrelevant to the activity through which we meet our collective needs.

Talking about Against Money

In the front window of McNally Jackson, one of my favorite NYC bookstores.

Against Money is now out. It’s been spotted in a number of bookstores, including the Union Square Barnes and Noble, where it turns out to be shelved next to Marx’s Capital in the Business section.

As my friend Suresh said to me the other day, as writers we should think of books as landmarks for a larger body of thought, rather than self-contained arguments in themselves. That is certainly the case with this book. But I am glad to see this piece of the larger project out in the world.

We had two very nice launch events, one at the University of Massachusetts (where both of us went to graduate school) and one at John Jay College, my academic home now. Both events had a great turnout, and I very much appreciated the discussion with Christine Dean, Jerry Epstein and Perry Mehrling at the UMass event, and with Zach Carter at the John Jay one. For me, it was like celebrating the holidays first with your family of origin and then with your own family.

Unfortunately, we were not able to record the John Jay event; there was video of the UMass one, but I am not sure when it will be available. But there are a couple other conversations we’ve had about the book recently that I can share.

First is an episode that Arjun and I did with The Climate Pod back in April. Despite the name (and usual focus) of the podcast, host Ty Benefiel had a lot of sharp and insightful questions about the nature of money and its relationship to the social and material world.

Second is an online roundtable we did with members of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics Society. This was a very nice conversation — I think philosophers and political theorists with a deep interest in money are perhaps the ideal readers for the book.

One thing I appreciated about both these conversations — and the two launch events — was the pressure our interlocutors put on us to bring out the real-world implications of our arguments, which the book itself is a bit light on. There is naturally a discussion of climate policy on The Climate Pod, but we also get into the pandemic response, democratizing the Fed, and other more real-world questions.

The book itself is primarily an attempt to get out of the flybottle of economic thinking about money, to borrow a phrase from Wittgenstein. But of course this is not just an academic critique — as Christine Desan observed at the UMass event, economics is not just another discipline, it offers a vision of the world that corresponds to the logic of life under the rule of capital. Or as she put it, “We are all in the flybottle.”

We’ve also recorded interviews with Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs, Brian Edwards-Tiekert of UpFront on KPFA, and Doug Henwood for his show Behind the News. I’ll post the links to those as they come out. As we mentioned to Doug, our original title for our book, at the very start of the project, was The Tyranny of Money. This was a nod to the closing lines of his Wall Street, which describes it as “a first draft for a project aiming to end the rule of money, whose tyranny is sometimes a little hard to see.” Like the fly in the bottle, it’s hard to escape when we can’t see the thing we are trapped in.

Talking about Zohran

As you certainly know, Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York last Tuesday. Indeed, if your life is like mine, you may feel you’ve been hearing about little else. The other day, as I was biking my younger kid to school, a young guy pulled up next to us with one of those portable speakers that some people like to use to blast music while biking. Except he wasn’t blasting music, but some kind of news commentary show discussing how Mamdani won. Truly, you can’t get away from it.

For my part, in the past couple weeks I’ve been on three different panels and done four interviews on the Mamdani policy agenda. Two of the panels were not recorded, but I thought I’d share the other one and three of the interviews. (The fourth doesn’t seem to have aired yet.) Perhaps you still are looking for Mamdani content, perhaps especially if it’s focused on the challenges of running the city than the election itself. And presumably if you are reading this you have some interest in my point of view. You could listen to them, I suppose, while you’re cooking, or exercising, or in your car, or from a portable speaker on your bike, or gathered your family around the computer with mugs of warm cider — however you prefer to consume your audiovisual content.

The first one, from October 14, is a roundtable organized by Dissent, with me, the indefatigable tenant organizer and housing advocate Cea Weaver, and City Councilmember Chi Ossé, another rising star of the New York left. This was a great conversation, with, though you can’t see it in the video, an enthusiastic and mostly quite young audience — very different from the crowd you used to expect at a Dissent event.

Also from mid-October, is a podcast interview with the Swedish researcher Max Jerneck (there’s a brief introduction in Swedish, which you can skip unless you happen to speak it.). It’s a long conversation, which covers a lot of ground: the first 50 minutes are on Zohran, then there’s 10 or 15 minutes on Trumpism, and the last 20 minutes or so are about Against Money. This was a nice combination from my point of view, since it was an opportunity to try to link the arguments in the book, which are mostly at a fairly abstract level, with more immediate political questions. There’s also a YouTube version, if you want to see me gesticulating; if I’d known he was posting the video, I would have cleaned up my home office first. The YouTube version also lets you see this funny picture Max pulled from the Nobel Prize Committee’s writeup of this year’s winners, which makes “household savings” literally the driving motor of growth — a nice example of the conceptual framework that the book is trying to help free us from.

Post-election, here is an interview with Sasha Linden Cohen on the show Background Briefing. Among other things, we talk about the politics and economics of free (and fast!) buses. Perhaps the key point to make there is that this is a more common policy than you might think. For example, here (via Doug Henwood) is an ad in the Financial Times from the government of Luxembourg, touting their free transit system.

It’s worth emphasizing here, also, that one of Zohran’s accomplishments in the legislature was creating a pilot program with one free bus line in each borough. So far, this has been quite successful, with ridership on the free lines up by about a third compared with other lines, and no sign that they are cannibalizing service from other parts of the system. If one votes for a pilot program — as large majorities in both houses of the legislature did here — it is presumably because adopting the idea generally seems at least plausible.

A second post-election interview was with Brian Edwards-Tiekert on UpFront on KPFA, where I am a somewhat regular guest. (I come on about 33 minutes in.) On this one, we talk more about the campaign itself — both the organization of it, and the campaign as a cultural phenomenon. We also talk quite a bit about his housing program (which is also the focus of the Dissent roundtable), and about what kind of cooperation can be expected from state government.

One point I made here, which I think has been underappreciated through this whole campaign, is how much national Democratic like Schumer and Jeffries are not typical of New York’s Democratic officials. Even in the primary, Zohran Mamdani got more endorsements from the City Council than Cuomo did. By the general election, almost every important city and state elected Democrat was with him. (His final pre-election rally, where the state’s top three officials served as the warm-up act for Bernie Sanders and AOC, drove this home.) This does not mean that there won’t be serious resistance to his agenda — especially insofar as it involves raising taxes on the rich — but I think it’s a mistake to imagine an ideologically coherent “establishment” opposing him. I think a lot of Democrats right now, including many self-identified centrists, are not at all sure what they should be doing in this moment, and would be happy to get behind a Zohran-type program if it looks like a winner. Chuck Schumer may see his number one job as “to keep the left pro-Israel,” but Kathy Hochul assuredly does not.

Finally, here’s an unexpected interview from Election Day. While I was out with the kids on one last get-out-the-vote canvass, we were stopped by someone doing video interviews for her YouTube channel (because of course we were, this is 2025). I wasn’t prepared to do much with this platform, but the kids really rose to the occasion.

Against Money

I’ve mentioned various times on this blog that Arjun Jayadev and I have been writing a book about money. The book, now called Against Money, is finally done: After two rounds of revisions, Arjun and I sent the final manuscript to the publisher earlier this month.² The book itself will not be coming out until next spring; I guess that’s just the kind of schedule academic publishers work on. But since I recently had to write up a summary of the book, I thought I’d share it here a bit in advance.

The goal of the book is to take longstanding arguments about the nature and function of money from the Keynesian tradition and bring them into contact with concrete historical and policy questions. Central to these arguments is a rejection of the idea that money is neutral, a veil over a non monetary “real economy. (“The Veil” was one of the working titles for the book.)

Economists — and not only economists — tend to assume that money values merely reflect the inherent scarcity and usefulness of objects existing in the world, and that the organization of economic life via money merely reflects more fundamental relationships of production and exchange. Against this, we argue that many important historical developments — from the rise of household debt in the United States to the sovereign-debt crisis in 2010s Europe — can only be understood in specifically monetary terms. Similarly, we argue that the interest rate cannot be understood in terms of a tradeoff between present versus future consumption, but only in terms of the scarcity of money itself, and that statistics like GDP are merely the aggregate of a certain set of money payments, rather then reflecting some underlying “real” quantity. Money, we argue, plays a critical coordinating role in modern societies, which has facilitated cooperation between strangers on a vast scale but which has shaped society in particular ways that are often inimical to human flourishing, and which must ultimately give way to other forms of cooperation.

The title Against Money is trying to do a few different things. First, it highlights the distinction between the network of money payments and values, on the one hand, and on the other hand the concrete social and material reality that exists apart from them, and often in tension with them. In this sense, we mean “against” in the same way one might distinguish a figure against a background; by writing about money, we seek to clarify our vision of the social world that exists around, outside and in opposition to it. Second, the title announces our criticism of familiar ways of thinking, our challenge to the dominant view of money within economics. Finally, the title links the book to a political project that seeks to transcend markets and property rights as the organizing principles of society, and to imagine a future in which money no longer defines the scope and possibilities of our collective existence.

The first chapter points to the broad hold of the idea that money is, or ought to be, a neutral representation of some underlying “real” economy, and proposes as an alternative the idea that money plays an active role as a device for coordinating productive activity. We discuss this in terms of several fundamental tensions or paradoxes inherent in the nature of money: that it functions as an objective, quantitative measurement, but there is no external quantity that it is measuring; that as a unit of measurement, it is an abstract, universal equivalent, but that in use it must always take some particular form; that its coordinating function requires it to be both rigid and elastic.

Chapters two and three explore how the two great monetary aggregates debt and capital evolve according to their own autonomous logics, actively reshaping — rather than merely reflecting — the organization of material life. With respect to debt, we highlight the importance of inflation and interest rates — as opposed to new borrowing — for its evolution over time, as well as the importance of political choices by central banks.

With respect to capital, our starting point is the tension between the conception of it as a mass of concrete means of production, on the one hand, and of a quantity of money, on the other. While economic theory treats capital as a quasi-physical substance that grows through the accumulation of savings, in reality, we argue, long run changes in measured capital are almost entirely due to changes in the value of existing assets. These in turn are explained by liquidity and financial conditions, on the one hand, and shifts in the relative social power of asset owners as against workers and the broader society, on the other.

Chapters four and five are concerned with the interest rate, the subject of some of the most difficult and important questions around money. We begin by criticizing both the conventional account of the interest rate in terms of substitution over time in a nonmonetary economy, and the related concept of the “”natural rate of interest” that is supposed to link this theoretical concept with the financial contracts that we observe around us. After rejecting these approaches to interest, we turn to Keynes’ alternatives. Keynes, we argue, offered two distinct accounts of interest — first, as the price of liquidity, and second, as a conventional price determined by the self-confirming speculative dynamics of bond markets. Both these stories, we argue, offer important insights into the interest rate, but they are two different stories, with sometimes quite different implications.

Chapter six focuses on money as measurement, interrogating the conventional practice of adjusting monetary quantities with a price index in order to compute underlying “real” quantities. In our view, what is real in an ontological sense is precisely the monetary payments and quantities. The ubiquitous practice of treating deflated money quantities as objects with an independent existence is deeply rooted in a ideological vision of the world that naturalizes markets and property rights; it distorts our efforts to understand the world in important ways.

Finally chapter seven asks what it means to imagine a world beyond money. Here we return to the idea of money as a coordination device, introduced in the opening chapter. Money is one particular way of organizing human activity — one that is especially suited to organizing cooperation between strangers, and separating specific forms of cooperation from the larger social matrix in which they are normally embedded. Thus it has played a central role in the creation of the vast division of labor that is so much more extensive in the modern world than in any previous society. But this is a not a process that continues without limit. Ongoing relationships tend to become reembedded, and conscious planning tends to replace the anonymous coordination of the market. Because we are so accustomed to thinking of productive life in terms of money, we tend to overlook the extent to which production is already socialized. Freeing ourselves from the rule of money may thus be a less utopian project than it appears.

The book is intended for a range of social scientists and humanists interested in debates about money, as well as a broader public of activists and intellectuals, and not (just) for economists. We hope it will make a connection between the rich but often obscure currents of thinking about money in the heterodox economics traditions drawing from Keynes and Marx, and the wider universe of public debates.

We have been working on this book for a long time. I first announced it on this blog in 2020 (promising an early 2022 publication date!), but my earliest notes and outline for the book are from 2016.³ One way of looking at the book is as an attempt to fill in the argument we sketched out in the conclusion of our 2016 paper on “The post-1980 debt-disinflation”:

It was one of the great insights of Keynes that modern economies cannot be conceived of only as ‘real exchange’ economies; many important questions can be answered only in terms of a model of a ‘monetary production’ economy… In a world where liquidity cannot be identified with any particular asset but is essentially a social relation, analysis of the financial side of the economy requires discussing the asset and liability side of balance sheets independently, rather than netting them out as the pseudo asset ‘net wealth’. Any discussion of debt, in particular, must start from the fact that it is a financial liability, and not simply a negative asset or an accumulated excess of consumption over income. …

Both mainstream and many heterodox economists tend to analyse debt in terms of real flows. … But, in fact, the financial relationships reflected on balance sheets and the real activities of production and consumption compose two separate systems, governed by two distinct sets of relationships. Explanations that reduce debt to the financial counterpart to some real phenomena ignore the specifically financial factors governing the evolution of debt. The evolution of demand and production has to be explained in its own terms, and the evolution of debt and other financial commitments has to be explained in its terms. …

As a historical matter, the evolution of household debt in the US bears little resemblance to any of the real variables whose financial counterpart it is imagined to be. … Indeed, as a first approximation, it would be better to imagine household income and expenditure as evolving according to one set of systematic relationships, and household balance sheets evolving according to an entirely separate set of relationships. Balance sheets and real flows do interact, sometimes strongly. But conceptualizing the two systems independently is an essential first step toward understanding the points of articulation between them.

Arjun and I have made similar arguments about the autonomous development of financial variables here, here, here and here, among other places.

The book also builds on our 2018 article (with Enno Schröder) on “The Political Economy of Financialization, ” where we wrote: “In addition to, or instead of, a method for allocating claims on productive resources, finance can be seen as a system for constraining the choices of other social actors.”

And it builds on my 2016 Jacobin piece “Socialize Finance.” There, I wrote about what money

is imagined to be in ideology: an objective measure of value that reflects the real value of commodities, free of the human judgments of bankers and politicians.

Socialists reject this fantasy. We know that the development of capitalism has from the beginning been a process of “financialization” — of the extension of money claims on human activity, and of the representation of the social world in terms of money payments and commitments. We know that there was no precapitalist world of production and exchange on which money and then credit were later superimposed: Networks of money claims are the substrate on which commodity production has grown and been organized. And we know that the social surplus under capitalism is not allocated by “markets,” despite the fairy tales of economists. Surplus is allocated by banks and other financial institutions, whose activities are coordinated by planners, not markets.

I can’t promise that the book fulfills all the promises made in those earlier pieces. But that is what is an attempt at.

Writing, as they say, is rewriting. Our first draft of the book was 200,000 words. The final version is just over 100,000 words. Some of this was the usual tightening, but a large part was the cutting of three substantial chapters. One was a historical sketch of debates about money and credit over the past two hundred years of economic thought. One was an extension of the chapter on money as measurement to the international context, looking critically at the use of purchasing power parity to compare “real income” across countries. And one was an exploration of the political economy of the corporation, as a central locus of the conflict between the logic of money and concrete productive activity.

The first of these excised chapters we will, I hope, publish relatively soon as a self-contained article. The second is going into the drawer for now; at some point in the future, perhaps it will form part of a successor to this book asking similar questions about a world with many different moneys. The third excised chapter, on the corporation, we are fleshing out into our next book. It is provisionally titled The Hidden Abode: Profits, Production and the Contradictions of the Corporation, and — knock on wood — should be published by the University of Chicago Press sometime in 2027.

A Conversation I Don’t Want to Have

UPDATE: Aaron Benanav was sick and tested positive for covid the day of the event. So it didn’t take place. A fitting reminder, perhaps, of the context in which these debates are happening.

This Wednesday, John Jay College is hosting a debate between me and Aaron Benanav on, ostensibly, industrial policy and global overcapacity, whatever that means.

This is an event I agreed to participate in very reluctantly. To be honest, the prospect of it has been causing me considerable stress and anxiety lately. As a way of relieving this, I thought I would try to articulate why this is a conversation I don’t want to have.

1. I don’t like polemics, especially with others on the left. Doug Henwood used to quote a line from Foucault, which unfortunately I cannot locate at the moment, on the dangers of approaching intellectual debates on the model of war. I feel this strongly. We all know how unpleasant social media discussions become when everything gets reduced to which side you are on.

This is not some new development with social media. Alexander Cockburn tells this story about Lenin:

Krupskaya once tried to get him out of Zurich to take the day off, relaxing in the Alps and admiring nature. He tried but stayed fidgety, finally crying out to Krupskaya in exasperation, ‘Those bloody Mensheviks spoil everything.’

It’s very easy, once you’ve picked a side, to let those bloody other-siders spoil everything. I know I am susceptible to that tendency, I’ve given in to it too much in the past. So I’d rather avoid settings that encourage the picking of teams. I don’t like the debate format. I don’t like being on “Team Keynes” against “Team Brenner,” or however this is supposed to line up.

If one is going to have a debate, it should be with someone you respect, with a view that you can imagine holding, or perhaps have held in the past. Better than a debate is a conversation, with people whose ideas may be in tension at various points but who are genuinely interested in learning from each other. A public debate in front of an audience, by contrast, is a sort of combat where the goal is negative critique, tearing down, rather than synthesis.

2. I don’t find the overcapacity argument coherent enough to try to refute it. I’ve read a lot of Brenner’s stuff, it’s all over the map. I’ve read some of Benanav. The affect is clear enough: He really hates Keynesians. But as for a set of substantive claims about observable social reality, I don’t see it. Very smart people like Seth Ackerman and Alex Williams and Tim Barker have tried to engage with them, without much success. Experience suggests that trying to extract a coherent meaning of overcapacity to engage with will just provoke a response of “that’s not what we meant.” Debating this non-argument feels like wrestling with a cloud.

3. I don’t think that the kind of knowledge that both Brenner-Benanav and their critics are aspiring to is even possible. I don’t think the position they are taking can be replaced with a better one; the question is just not a useful one.

What I mean is this. Capitalism, or better, capital, is a game, an activity that people engage in. It has its rules, its values, its categories. Understanding its logic is important. But logic, on the level of logic, only tells us about the parameters, the dimensions, of capitalist space. It tells us nothing about what will actually happen. At best it allows us to identify tendencies, all of which have their counter-tendencies. The logic of capital tells us which ways the system can move, but nothing about how it has moved, or will move. When we turn to explaining concrete historical developments — retrospectively or prospectively — we need to do so in concrete historical terms. If we ask, let us say, why employment growth was slower in most European countries in the 1980s and 1990s compared with the 1960s and 1970s, there are a number of possible factors that might contribute, or point in the other direction. The only possible answer to the question will be a quantitative one, asking how much various factors contributed in this particular period. General tendencies of capitalism tell us nothing at all.

The academic work I feel best about is a couple of papers asking, in a concrete historical way, how we explain the changes in household debt-income ratios over the past 100 years The answers turn out to be different in different periods. The interesting thing, to me, is the key takeaway that the rise in the debt ratio in the 1980-2008 period, versus the stable ratio in the previous 20 years, is entirely explained by higher interest rates plus lower inflation. But the methodology — and this is the critical point — also reveals plenty of exceptions. During the mid 2000s, for instance, it really is true that households were borrowing more. If we want to learn about the world, we need a method of asking questions that gives answers of the form “x percent this, but also y percent that”, or “in this period mostly this, but in that period mostly that,” or “this factor was supporting the overall trend but that factor was retarding it.” These are all quantitative statements, and will be different depending on the place and time we are discussing. If you think you can reason in a purely logical way to concrete historical outcomes, you aren’t talking about the real world.

4. Continuing from 3 — to have a useful discussion, the questions have to be reframed as concrete, operational ones. Public spending on green energy will improve the bargaining power of workers, or it won’t. Chinese investment in renewable energy has reduced, or increased, manufacturing investment in the rest of the world by this much, more or less. Some more or less concretely specified central bank policy to favor green investment could reduce carbon emissions by some amount, or more, or less. Until we frame our questions in this sort of way, with answers that are numbers or clear yes-or-nos, there is nothing useful to talk about. We need to debate principles in such a way that we are learning about concrete reality. I don’t see this debate as a step towards that.

5. I am not convinced that the phenomenon of “stagnation” or “overcapacity” exists. It is true that by most measures growth appears to have been stronger in Europe in the decades after World War II than, to the extent we have comparable measures, in most other times and places. But it is not at all clear that the absence of this outstanding performance should be described as a distinct phenomenon of “stagnation” or “overcapacity”. Maybe we should instead ask what combination of institutional factors created this exceptional case. Nor is it clear that the same pattern exists if we broaden our focus — China, in the decades of so-called stagnation, has seen what is probably the greatest episode of capitalist accumulation in human history. (The problems that China poses for the Brenner argument need more attention than I am in a position to give.)

And even if “stagnation” is valid as a descriptive historical fact, it doesn’t follow that it represents any underlying tendency. Let’s say we are in the US in 1935. Why is business investment so low, why are so many people unemployed? “Because it’s a depression” would be true in a certain descriptive sense. But, obviously, as an explanation it would get us nowhere at all. I’m not convinced that talking about overcapacity today is much different from that.

Admittedly, the question of whether some capitalist economies can be described as experiencing stagnation (and which ones, and over what period) is a concrete, empirically-tractable question, in a way that some inherent tendency toward stagnation is not. But the claim would have to be much more precisely specified before it could be disputed. And clearly neither of us is undertaking the sort of detailed, data-based analysis that would be called for.

6. Benanav’s response to my blog post — it really was just a blog post — was dishonest and insulting. It still pisses me off that I can write, as I did, “leftists should not imagine that we control the state,” and get quoted as saying “we control the state.” It annoys me that I can suggest an analogy between the transition way from carbon and the industrial revolution and get this response: “any such comparison between the 1840s—an era of incipient French industrialization—and contemporary overcapacity, following the onset of the demand shift over a century later, is so ahistorical as to border on the absurd.” I mean, what is this? Ahistorical, absurd? Come on man. Industrialization wasn’t just a random bolt from the blue, it was the result of exactly the kind of positive feedback mechanisms I was talking about.

This blithe dismissal is simply a refusal to engage with the argument. I was trying to introduce something interesting into the conversation — is anyone else writing about the Green New Deal quoting 19th century French historians? And this guy, who is supposed to be some kind of social scientist, just pisses on it. I won’t pretend it doesn’t annoy me.

7. I have other work to do. I am trying to finish this book. I am trying to teach. (My teaching is bad, but my students are excellent.) I am trying to write opinion pieces for a general public; perhaps people will read them. All of that seems more important than this thing.

8. Finally the biggest one. The debate objectively places me in the position of a defender of the Biden Administration, something that, at this moment, I have no desire to be. Maybe, if I’m honest, this is the real reason why I am so angry about having to do this debate. Thousands of children are dead and dying under the rubble of Gaza. The bombs that killed them are marked “Made in USA.” Will I, under these circumstances, stand up and defend Bidenomics? No, I will not.

As an analytic matter, it’s certainly possible to separate the general case for industrial policy from the murderous regime that is currently its standard bearer. But in the specific context of the United States in November 2023, I don’t know that you can. Maybe my anger at Benanav, and at my colleagues who pushed me to debate him, is really anger at myself for having associated myself with a regime of child-killers. This is a possibility I must take seriously. It calls for resolute self-criticism and introspection.

There is a very complex and difficult problem here. We must sometimes take a clear stand on principle, we must stand against fascism and genocide. We must also, all the time, make an honest assessment of existing conditions, and what we can do in the concrete circumstances we find ourselves in. We must recognize that the path to a better world consists of one step after another, and starts from where we currently are.

Sometimes these two principles are consistent, sometimes they are not. It can be hard to figure out how to reconcile them. We do have to figure it out. I would be very interested in a roundtable on how socialists should relate to the state and established parties in the current moment. But one — or at least I — would have to approach it in a spirit of uncertainty, questioning and an openness to learning from others. Not a debate between opposing sides.

However: John Jay economics is a great program! And we need students! So please do come out for this thing, and, if you’re at a suitable stage of life, please apply to our graduate program. Someday, maybe you will get all this stuff right, where I clearly have not.

At Substack: Hello World

I barley keep up this blog any more; do I really need a new format for (not) writing online? The problem, from my point of view, is that, these days, the only way people see blogs (or most other things one writes) is via twitter. And relying on twitter does not, at this point, see like a great idea. I’m moderately hopeful that an email newsletter can offer an alternative way.

In any case, my new substack is here. It’s pretty no-frills at the moment. I’ve pasted the first post below. For the moment I plan on cross-posting everything, but depending on how the substack goes I may revisit that.

What is this? This is an email newsletter, delivered through Substack. You probably get some others like it already. This one is from me, Joshua William Mason, or J. W. Mason as I usually write it. It’s called Money and Things. This specific email or post is the first one.

Why am I getting this? Either you signed up for it, or I added you. I subscribed a few people who I thought might be interested in hearing from me now and then. I hope you don’t mind! If you do, there’s an unsubscribe button somewhere. I promise I won’t add you again.

What’s the point of it? My main goal with this is to share things I’ve said or written in other settings, along with some interesting things I have read. I write a fair amount in a fair number of venues, and am in the news now and then. So it seems worth having one place to share it all with people who might like to see it. And then, despite the firehouse of content constantly aimed at each of our heads, it still can be nice to have someone point out something worth reading that you might not have run across otherwise.

The other goal is to have a structure for comments on things that are happening in the world. There are always things going on that I don’t have the time or energy or confidence to write about at length, but might have something interesting to say about in a more informal setting. Will a substack be any better for this than the blog I’ve been keeping for the past dozen years? I don’t know, but it seems worth a try.

So, a lot like a twitter feed, then? Yes, very much. I want to use the newsletter to share material that right now I use twitter for. Not everyone is on twitter, after all. And while I can’t see myself getting off twitter entirely – there are still too many interesting people there – I would like to spend less time on it, for all the familiar reasons.

How often will you be sending these? I’m vaguely hoping for once a week. I’m sure it won’t be more often than that; it could be much less. I will at least try to send one out whenever I publish something.

Why is the newsletter called Money and Things? Well, that captures the range of my interests. I write a lot about money, finance, central banks, credit and debt, inflation and other money-related and money-adjacent topics. But I also write about other things.

Also, Money and Things is the working title of the book that Arjun Jayadev and I are working on. This book has been in progress for longer than I care to think about, but it’s now mostly written and should be coming out from the University of Chicago Press sometime in the next year. So I also want to use this email to share material from the book, and, down the road, to encourage people to read it.

What is the book about? Oof, I hoped you wouldn’t ask that. Well, it’s about money … and things.

Can you be more specific? The book is an effort to pull together some different strands of thinking around money that Arjun and I have been grappling with since we were students at the University of Massachusetts 20 years ago. One place to start is the tendency — both in economics and everyday common sense — to think of money either as just one useful object among others, or as a faithful reflection of a material world outside itself. Whereas to us it seems clear we should think of it as constituting its own self-contained world, a game or a logic, that in some ways responds to external material and social reality, but also evolves autonomously, and reshapes that external world in its turn. Economists like to think that when we measure things in terms of money, that is capturing some pre-existing “real” value or quantity. (Like, when you see a figure like GDP, you assume in some sense it reflects a quantity of stuff that was produced.) But in fact — our argument goes — while money is a yardstick that allows all sorts of things to be numerically compared, it doesn’t reflect any underlying quantity except money itself.

Keynesians have been criticizing the idea that money is neutral, just a veil, for decades. But we think there’s still space to spell out what the positive alternative looks like, and why it matters. You might say it’s an attempt to elevate the argument of our “Fisher dynamics” papers — where we argued that movements in debt-income ratios have more to do with interest rates and inflation than change in borrowing behavior — into a worldview or paradigm.

What we’re mainly interested in is the interface or boundary between money-world and the concrete world outside of it. (One jokey summary is that we’re starting from Keynes’ General Theory of Money, Interest and Employment, and writing about the “and”.) The idea is that by focusing there, we can connect some long-standing theoretical questions around the nature of money with contemporary debates about policy and politics, and with historical developments like the shareholder revolution or the euro crisis. We’re aiming for a spot in intellectual space somewhere between Jim Crotty, Perry Mehrling, Doug Henwood and David Graeber, if that makes sense.

Will you have a better answer to this question by the time the book comes out? I hope so!

Getting back to the newsletter — will there be free and paid versions? No, there will not. If someone wanted to give me money for it, I wouldn’t say no. If I got a little, I’d buy my kids ice cream. If I got a significant amount, which seems unlikely, then I might put more time into writing it. If I get none at all, that’s perfectly fine.

My personal view – which I know not everyone shares – is that if you are a tenure-track academic, it’s a bit unethical to charge money for a newsletter or similar product. The job of an academic is not just teaching; we are being paid to think about the world and share what we learn. So to me – again, I know many people feel differently – when you turn your work as a scholar into a kind of private business venture, that’s almost a form of embezzlement. Perhaps you saw Inside Job, that movie about economists and the financial crisis. Remember how eagerly someone like Frederic Mishkin turned his stature as a big-name monetary economist into big checks for himself? I don’t want to be that guy. Of course I’m not under any illusion that my integrity carries anything like the market price of a Mishkin’s. But it’s still worth something to me.

To be clear, this doesn’t apply to people who make a living as journalists or writers. If you are a professional writer your readers need to be paying you one way or another, and subscriber-only newsletter content is a legitimate way to make that happen. But as an academic, I’m already being compensated for this kind of work.

Does this mean your book will also be distributed for free? Well, no. The publishers will charge whatever they normally do for a book like this, and Arjun and I will get whatever (presumably small) royalties we’re entitled to out of that.

So how is that different? I don’t know. I feel like it’s different? Of course producing a physical book is costly, and the publisher has their own employees, whose services are valuable, and other costs that have to be paid. On the other hand, it would be technically feasible to just put the book up online as a pdf, and let anyone download it. So making people pay is in some sense a choice we are making. Still, if Inside Job had merely caught Mishkin admitting he’d published a book about financial crises, I don’t think that would have been much of a gotcha. Although then again, on the other hand, the textbook-writing business does seem a bit morally compromised. (Personally I try not to assign anything I can’t distribute a free pdf of.) I do hope our book will be used in the classroom. But I wish students could get excerpts of it in xeroxed course packets, they way I did when I was in college.

Anyway. Money and Things, the newsletter, will always be entirely free. Money and Things, the book, will not be.

You seem to have strong feelings on this topic. Do you have anything else to say about it? Yes, I do. I’ve always found it infuriating that so much scholarly work is hidden behind paywalls. It goes against the whole idea of scholarship, especially if you think of your academic work as part of some political project or as otherwise useful. During the six-seven years between my two stints in graduate school, I was intermittently engaged in online economics discussions, and I found it deeply frustrating that there were so many interesting articles that, without an academic affiliation, I was not permitted to read. I hope someday we recognize IP as applied to academic work for what it is, a comprehensive regime of censorship. (And Alexandra Elbakyan, the creator of sci-hub, as one of humanity’s heroes.)

A bit more recently, but still some years ago, I joined the steering committee of the Union for Radical Political Economics in large part to see if I could convince them to convert URPE’s journal, the Review of Radical Political Economics, to open access. Here you are, I thought, doing work that’s supposed to be part of a larger transformative project, that is relevant not just for other academics but for workers and activists. So why are you enlisting the power of the state to stop people from reading it?

As is often the case, what seemed unanswerable in principle turned out to be less straightforward in practice. The leadership of URPE the organization is largely separate from that of the journal; there’s a multi-year contract with the publisher; and even if open access were allowed, URPE’s share of the subscription revenue is basically the organization’s entire budget. If we went open-access, how would we pay the editor, or award fellowships to students in heterodox programs, or fly people out for the steering committee meetings? Maybe, I suggested, allowing people to read the journal is more important than flying people to meetings. Easy for you to say, someone replied, you live in New York; for others, if they can’t come out and meet in person, they won’t be part of this community at all. Besides, are there really so many non-academics who want to read RRPE?

Maybe if I’d pushed harder I could have got somewhere. But the obstacles were real, and no one seemed to agree with me, so I gave up, and eventually left the steering committee. (Life is too short to be on too many committees.) But I still think I was right.

Anything else? No, I think that’s it for now. But don’t worry – there will be another post coming shortly after this one.

“Inflation is bad. But mass unemployment would have been worse.”

(Lauren Melodia and I had an op-ed in the Nov. 21 Washington Post, challenging the idea that today’s inflation means that the stimulus measures of the past year and half were too large. I’m posting it here as well.)

As we think about rising prices today, it’s important not to lose sight of where we were not so long ago. In the spring of 2020, much of the economy abruptly shut down. Schools and child-care centers closed. Air travel fell below 100,000 people a day, compared with 2.5 million daily passengers in a normal year. No one was staying in hotels or going to the gym. About 1.4 million small businesses shut their doors in the second quarter of the year.

More than 20 million Americans lost their jobs in the early days of the pandemic, and there was a very real possibility that many would face hunger, eviction and poverty. Many economists predicted a deep downturn comparable to the Great Recession that followed the financial crisis of 2007-08, if not the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Even at the start of this year, as Congress was debating the American Rescue Plan, it was far from clear that we were out of danger. In January, there were 10 million fewer jobs than a year earlier. Covid-related deaths were running at 30,000 per week — the highest rate at any point in the pandemic. No one knew how fast vaccines could be rolled out. There was still a real risk that the economy could tip into depression.

Thanks to stimulus measures, including the $2.2 trillion Cares Act, signed by President Donald Trump in March 2020, and the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, signed by President Biden in March 2021, that didn’t happen. People who lost their jobs in restaurants, airports, hotels and elsewhere continued to pay their rent and put food on the table.

For much of 2020 and 2021, all the uncertainty — and the risks associated with vacationing, dining out and so on — meant households held back on spending, and savings piled up. Now, with the economy reopening and the worst of the pandemic (let’s hope) behind us, people are rushing to make use of those savings. Unfortunately, businesses can’t adjust production as fast as people can spend money, resulting in the inflation we’re seeing now: Prices rose 0.9 percent from September to October 2021 and are up 6.2 percent since October 2020.

It would be nice if there were a way to avoid economic catastrophe during the year-plus of pandemic restrictions while also avoiding rising prices today. But in the real world, there probably wasn’t. The pandemic imposed costs on the economy that had to be paid one way or another.

Think of it this way. When a restaurant shuts down for public health reasons, two things happen: Its services are not available for purchase, and the people who work there lose their incomes. If the government does nothing, aggregate demand and supply will remain in rough balance, but the displaced workers will be unable to pay their bills. Alternatively, the government can step in to maintain the incomes of the displaced workers. In this case, the spending that consumers might have done in restaurants will spill over into the rest of the economy — if not right away, then eventually. In a sense, the rising costs we’re seeing today are a result of economic production that didn’t happen last year.

In economics textbooks, the level of demand that brings the economy to full employment will also cause stable inflation — an assumption labeled “the divine coincidence.” But here on Earth, things don’t always work out so neatly. The level of spending required to replace incomes lost in the pandemic, combined with the disruptions to production and trade, meant there was no way to get an adequate recovery without some increase in inflation, especially given the bumps on the road to controlling the coronavirus. As the spread of the delta variant and some Americans’ resistance to getting a vaccine have held back spending on services, demand has spilled over into goods. And as it turns out, our global supply chains are unable to handle a rapid rise in demand for goods — especially because many manufacturers had expected a deep downturn and planned accordingly.

Today’s inflation has surprised many people, including us. We had been more worried about sustained high unemployment. One of us even gave a talk a year ago called “The Coronavirus Recession Is Just Beginning.” We were wrong about that. But then, so was almost everyone. In the summer of 2020, the Congressional Budget Office was predicting that the unemployment rate in late 2021 would be 8 percent; in fact, it has fallen to 4.6 percent. Many private forecasters were similarly gloomy. Under the circumstances, policymakers were absolutely right to prioritize payments to families.

The economist Larry Summers has been making the case since February that the government’s stimulus programs were larger than required and ran the risk of “inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.” Fiscal conservatives are claiming that Summers has been vindicated because inflation is higher than most supporters of the most recent relief package expected. But the economic data doesn’t match the scenario he described.

Summers predicted that the cumulative stimulus impact would be larger than the country’s output gap — the difference between actual and potential gross domestic product. Today, despite the stimulus, both real and nominal GDP remain significantly below the pre-pandemic trend. So unless you think the economy was operating above potential before the pandemic, there’s no reason to think it is above potential now. To the extent that domestic conditions are contributing to inflation, it’s not because spending has surpassed the economy’s capacity but because there has been a rapid shift in demand from services to goods.

In any case, most of the inflation we’re seeing is due not to domestic conditions but to the worldwide spike in food, energy and shipping costs. Perhaps we could have had inflation of 5 percent instead of 6 percent if the stimulus had been smaller. The cost of that trade-off would have been material hardship for millions of families and the risk of tipping the economy into a downturn. And that, fundamentally, is why today’s inflation is not a sign that the stimulus was too large: It has to be weighed against the risks on the other side.

After 2007, the United States experienced many years of high unemployment and depressed growth, thanks in large part to a stimulus that most now agree was too small. Policymakers belatedly learned that lesson, and as a result, the United States is making a rapid recovery from the most severe economic disruption in modern history. Yes, inflation is a real problem that needs to be addressed. In a recent Roosevelt Institute brief, we suggested that rather than raise interest rates, the best way to control inflation is to address supply constraints in the sectors where prices are climbing. But as bad as inflation is, mass unemployment is much worse. Given the alternatives, policymakers made the right choice.