In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods; to the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is time to lay the foundations for that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And clearly, one of the changes that we have to make as we lay the foundations for that future we’d be proud to leave behind, is in the way that we deal with money, the ways that we exchange, store and account for value, the ways that we organise our markets, the ways that we care for each other and monetise it. And if you’ve listened to this podcast for any length of time, you’ll know that as far as I am concerned, we live in the dying days of the death cult that is predatory capitalism, and that capitalism itself is predicated on the commodification of suffering. These are fundamental to how I see the world. But fundamental also is that this does not have to be the case. As Ursula Le Guin said over ten years ago now: ‘we live in capitalism, its power seems unassailable. But so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings’. And I was so taken with that quote that I named my last novel Any Human Power, so you can tell that I genuinely believe it. So this podcast is going to look in detail and in depth at how we might do things differently. Our guest this week is Colleen Schneider, and Colleen is a doctoral student in social ecological economics and policy in Vienna.

Manda: Colleen is a person I have been looking for for a long time because her key research areas are ecological economics, environmental justice, monetary and financial systems in a post-growth economy and climate policy. And she said in an email to me: ‘I take a sociological and anthropological approach to understanding money as fundamentally a social relation. Money and the monetary system, as with their economic system, are things we have created and we can create otherwise. I draw on historical examples to help understand how the institutional structure of the monetary system and our ideas about money came to be what they are. And then to challenge these, I seek to denaturalise money and point to ways to restructure the money system as democratised and localised, to realise money as a public good. I focus more specifically on how monetary and fiscal policy can be directed towards meeting human needs within environmental limits, while maintaining macroeconomic stability’. So this is the focus of today’s conversation. And as you can tell, this is a field about which I am passionate. I absolutely believe that if everybody understood how money actually works in our current world, how it is made, how it is brought into being and distributed, how the choices are made of how we send money out into the world, a lot of the power inequities that we currently experience would end.

Manda: So Colleen and I have endeavoured to minimise the use of jargon. However, we did talk about monetary and fiscal policy, so we need to unpick that at the start to let you know that monetary policy is about keeping prices stable, about using interest rates to influence inflation, that kind of thing. Fiscal policy is about the spending decisions that governments make. Do we have austerity or don’t we? Do we fund social goods or don’t we? Do we decide to pour money into the military or don’t we? And the nature of taxation; what rates do we levy and on whom? What are the bans and what loopholes do we leave wide open so that our friends can escape paying taxes altogether, while everybody else continues to pretend that government spending is limited by the tax take, which is Nonsense. Taxation is about levelling the playing field, it is not about how we choose to pay for the NHS or anything else. So here we go. I hope by the end the lies that underpin our current economic system will have been blown wide open for you, and you will understand how money is made and how the choices are made to spend it and to move it around the economy. Coleen spends her entire life working in this field. She has written some fascinating papers and a chapter in a forthcoming book that genuinely blew me away. So she speaks to these things far more eloquently and intelligently than I can. So here we go. People of the podcast, please do welcome Colleen Schneider, ecological degrowth and modern monetary theorist and all round truly amazing person.

Manda: Colleen Schneider, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this drizzly summer’s day, I’m glad to say?

Colleen: Manda, thank you so much for having me. I’ll start with the where are you; I am in Vienna at home, which is alongside the Danube and the old Danube, which is part of the the old flow path of the river before it was carved out. So sitting between the two waters, which is really a lovely space to be. And I’m well. We’ve also had a very unusually rainy and not too hot summer, and I feel like it sort of has this mellow feeling and I have this mellow feeling along with it now. So that’s the space I’m in right now.

Manda: Yay! I have rain envy, because this is going out in September, but we’re recording it right at the end of July. And we had rain last night for the first time in a very long time, and it wasn’t very much. So sending some of your mellow rain would be really good. Because we are in the middle of massive disruption, climate chaos and political chaos. And one of the things that seems to me key to creating the total systemic change that we need, is shifting our relationship with how we account for, exchange and store money. Which is to say, our economics. How does our economics function? How do markets function? What is the political economics, and what are the narratives that we tell ourselves around money? And I am so excited, actually, to have found someone who really gets this and can explain it in clear and succinct ways. So tell us, what are the problems with how we see money and economics now, and how can we shift those?

Colleen: Yeah. So if you were unfortunate enough ever to have taken a mainstream economics course, you would have heard very little about money. But what you would have heard would probably have been to the effect of we used to have barter economies where everyone exchanged things, this was terribly inconvenient so we chose a particular commodity to function as money, which we could mark all other goods and services against. But money doesn’t have any effect on the real economy, it’s neutral, it’s just a veil over economic activity. So it’s just this commodity that we use to to make things more efficient.

Manda: And to begin with, it was gold or silver. It was a precious metal of some sort that was in relatively short supply, and that could be exchanged and handed to people and stored and counted relatively easily. We didn’t decide that leaves on trees.

Colleen: Yes. And the value of money was tied to the value of that particular commodity. Yeah. And the problem with that story is that there’s absolutely no historical anthropological evidence that that was what happened, right? There was never, as far as we know, an economy where barter was the primary economic mode. So, of course, there’s been societies that use barter. But now we we tend to take this very narrow view of what the economy is; the economy is market exchange with money. But that’s just one particular economic mode, one particular type of economic activity. Karl Polanyi, for example, talks about householding and reciprocity and redistribution as other economic modes. David Graeber uses the term Commoning. So there’s different ways we can look at this, but these are all economic modes. And historically societies used a variety of these modes and sometimes market exchange would be an element of that.

Manda: We need to go into detail of what do you mean by market exchange.

Colleen: Yeah. So market exchange is I will purchase a good or a service from you. So it’s not embedded in any particular relationship of trust, it’s this neutral exchange, where you know, you’re getting the money which has a particular value, and then you will give me your good or service for this. It’s what we think of now.

Manda: Yep. So I want your potatoes, you want my bit of silver and we will exchange.

Colleen: Exactly.

Manda: And then you can use my bit of silver for something else. I think people who think money is a good thing claim that it’s neutral, because I could get potatoes from you, or I could go and buy a pair of shoes. Or I could buy a massage or a haircut. It’s got equal value or let’s say it’s got value, in a whole group of different goods and services.

Colleen: I actually don’t think money is a bad thing. I think money is a tool for coordinating economic activity. And the form of that tool and the way we structure the monetary system have very different effects depending on that structure. So when we think of money now, we think of our government. So I’m in Austria so part of the eurozone, or you’re in the UK they issue the euro or the pound. And this is fiat currency and this is a very hierarchical system, but there’s other forms of monetary systems. And money itself, to go back to this idea of the story of what money is and where it comes from, as far as we can tell, the first forms of this kind of general purpose money, which means money that can be used to purchase all different kinds of objects, not just for a very specific purpose. It goes back about 5000 years to the temples of ancient Sumer, where it was and is a way of coordinating economic activity. So money, the first forms of money weren’t some kind of coin or something like this, like people would probably think of now, if you think of early moneys. It was a credit system, a credit based system, and it preceded markets. It preceded, but at the same time allowed for the further development of markets.

Colleen: So money from the get go is political. It is always and everywhere political. It’s created through community, through these political structures, to coordinate economic activity. And you can do this in different ways that have different effects. You can have different credit or debtor relationships that are going to have different effects. You can make the creation and distribution in ways that are more or less hierarchical. Which is why I say money itself isn’t bad, right? It’s a tool, right? So the way that we use that tool is what matters. And the way we use it now…

Manda: Is toxic.

Colleen: Yes. This is highly problematic. But also because money has been apparently, I say apparently because it is always political; it has been apparently depoliticised. We have this idea of commodity money. So it’s not something we create, it’s just there and it has this value. And in the same way that we think we have to serve the economy, we have to not ask for raises or give up on these things we might want to make the economy work right. We have to suffer austerity to make the economy work. We have the same idea about money. Now we have to serve the monetary system.

Manda: That we were all just born to pay bills and die, which is clearly not true.

Colleen: As opposed to we created the economy, we created the monetary system, yeah, the form that money takes.

Manda: Yeah. Okay. So in all of this, the narrative that we’ve created for ourselves over many thousands of years says that money is neutral. We’ve got to a point in our modern political economies, which have two other myths, which you highlight in your papers and in your book chapter. One of which is that the economy has to keep growing, and the other of which is that governments are limited in how much they can spend, and that the limit is largely defined by the tax income. That my taxes are paying for somebody else’s welfare is a narrative that is very common in Western political economies. Let’s look at growth later. But let’s for a moment look at where you’ve got to with a combination of degrowth theory and modern monetary theory, which completely debunks this idea that government spending is limited by the tax take. Is that a good place to go forward?

Colleen: Yeah. So let’s first talk about the monetary system and how governments create money. I mentioned earlier that we have a fiat monetary system, so what does that mean? That means the money isn’t tied to any particular commodity. It has value because the institutions, the political structures that issue it, say it has this value and we trust in those institutions. We trust that we can go to the ATM and put our bank card in and we’re going to get out the money that we asked for, and that we can then go somewhere and purchase something for that value and we’ll be able to get what we expect. So the value isn’t because it’s tied to any particular commodity. So governments that issue their own currency, like the UK issues the pound or the US issues the dollar, they issue that first; they spend that money into the economy and then they take that money out of the economy through taxation. So the spending is actually monetary creation and the taxation is actually monetary destruction. So that order of operations is quite important.

Manda: Yeah. I think we just need to highlight that bit. That governments spend money into existence. It didn’t exist and they create it and they spend it. I think people still have a sense that there’s this kind of pile of gold in a big vault somewhere, and it’s a limited size, and the government takes some in as tax and gives a little bit out. And I don’t know how we debunk that strongly enough; that the government spends money into existence. Or the banks lend it, because it’s not all coming from the government. We have given private banks the capacity to make money out of nothing, and then sell it to us at a profit. And the fact that people don’t understand that, is I think the only reason we haven’t had an armed revolution.

Colleen: And it’s interesting here, I like the historical stories to kind of give some perspective on this. Because there’s times historically where it has been more clear and people’s reactions were much different. So, for example, during the Civil War in the United States, the Treasury in the North, so this was part of the classical gold standard era, which is when money was pegged to a commodity. So the amount of money was limited. I’ll talk about the US, but this has happened over time in so many different places to fund wars, specifically; the political authority will stop using any kind of commodity peg to create more money, to create fiat money, or they will change the value of the gold or the silver in the coin relative to the value of the coin. The number that they mark on it that they say that it’s worth.

Manda: Yes. Nero did this in Rome. He watered down the silver in a denarius with nickel. And everybody knew he was doing it, and he’s the emperor, nobody can stop him. So this is not an original thing. But yes, sorry, in the Civil War in the US, they broke the gold standard basically, and went money is what we make it to be. Here, look, have a dollar that we just created out of nothing.

Colleen: Exactly. Because even on commodity standards, the value of money isn’t determined by some kind of precious commodity in the coinage. It’s determined by the political authority who issues the money, saying this is the value of the money, right?

Manda: This is why I say that money is always predicated on violence, the way that we use money. Because if I made a silver denarius in Roman times and tried to put Nero’s face on it, they would kill me. They would crucify me and enslave my children, because only the people who have Nero’s authority get to do that. Otherwise, I’m effectively being a forger. And the penalty for forging has changed over time; they no longer crucify you and enslave your children; but they still lock you up. And fiat currency I think is a lovely concept, that we trust it. But actually, it’s not that we trust it, it’s that the penalty for somehow changing the value of that by making our own is deemed to be so huge that people, generally speaking, don’t do it. And if they get away with it, they generally don’t get away with it for very long. So anyway, let’s go back to the American Civil War.

Colleen: I’ll respond to this quickly and then go back to the Civil War. So the thing is, anyone can create money but the trick is getting it accepted. I can start issuing Colleen bucks, but who’s going to want them? What’s the value? Banks can create money because the government says we will treat the money you create as public currency. And this goes back to 1694, the Bank of England, this is where the structure emerges. But that’s the reason that they’re able to create money. You and I actually could create different forms of money. You and I could say, hey, let’s set up a mutual credit exchange system, you know?

Manda: Yes, yes. Well local currencies do exactly this. The Totnes pound existed for quite a long time, and they created a £9 note because they could, which is not something that exists within the fiat currency. Yes. Let’s go back to the Civil War because this is really interesting, is what happened when one or other side in the Civil War decided that they just wanted to create their own dollars.

Colleen: Yeah. So the North needed money to fund the war. They were restricted by the commodity peg of the gold standard. So they went off the gold standard and they started issuing green bills. The Treasury was issuing green bills to pay soldiers and pay for supplies, and then they would accept these back for taxation. So they had value. You had to pay your taxes and you could pay your taxes with these things. And then they wanted to go back on the gold standard after the war. And there was a political party, the greenbacks, and the people involved in it, the greenbackers, because they could see what had happened so clearly. The political nature of money and the monetary system as it was structured, was right there in front of their eyes. And if they went back on the gold standard, this would have caused a devaluation of the currency. So rather than inflation, it would have caused deflation, which would have not been good for producers, and it would have increased the value of farmers debts. So there was a coalition that was opposed to this and was arguing for at least a bimetallic standard rather than just a gold standard. This political party existed for quite some time. They never won office, but there was a substantial political movement around this because the political nature of money was so apparent through this process. And that’s been sort of hidden since then. Because we think oh money is not something I could I could wrap my head around and I’ll just sort of leave it to the economists.

Manda: But then cryptocurrencies came along and things like Dogecoin quite plainly created a money out of nothing; a cryptocurrency. And it got value because people decided it was worth trading. It had zero value. It did not exist. It was units on a blockchain and it soared in value against the dollar, as Bitcoin has done. And I don’t understand and maybe you do, why that has not equally undermined everybody’s concept of money. If Bitcoin can basically be created out of nothing. And yes, it takes mining, but Ethereum less so, and yet they have real world value. Why is it not obvious to everybody that money is an agreement that we make, and the constraints are what we choose them to be?

Colleen: So let’s think about the context in which Bitcoin emerged. It’s the great financial crisis. And in the great financial crisis, we have this unprecedented fiscal spending, unprecedented government spending, largely to bail out banks.

Manda: Yes, £875 billion in the UK. 40% of GDP as quantitative easing. Yes.

Colleen: And there’s two substantial reactions to this that are very different. One is Bitcoin is crypto, right, as a critique of the monetary system. Another is the occupy movement. And so what the occupy movement is saying is ‘hey, we see that you’re able to do this. We see you’re able to to spend all this money into the economy. Why are you doing it to save banks instead of bailing out people?’ You know, you had these famous postcards like ‘if the climate was a bank, you would have saved it already’. You know, this kind of thing. So we see it’s political and we are calling for it to be directed towards different ends.

Colleen: The crypto reaction is much different. It actually says the political nature of money is what’s problematic, so we’re going to make it totally, totally apolitical and attempt to make this currency that is just fixed commodity, it’s neutral, it’s apolitical, and then this solves all the problems.

Manda: Right. And it’s not based on any trust. I mean, the whole thing, let’s not get down the Bitcoin or the blockchain route, because even that was also a lie. It was hugely political.

Colleen: Yeah, I wouldn’t call it money. I would call it a speculative financial asset.

Manda: Yeah. And it wasn’t neutral and it was predicated on a whole bunch of assumptions that the Chinese very nearly blew apart. However, let’s stay with money. So we have in the West, still, got a narrative that says government spending is limited. Governments cannot spend a certain amount more. Everybody’s terribly worried about the US trade deficit or the US overspend, that they’re now in trillions of dollars of debt, as if that debt was anything other than imaginary. Talk to us about why this is a myth.

Colleen: Yeah. So when the government spends during a fiscal year and it has intakes, it has taxes during a fiscal year. And the difference between those, if it spends more than it brings in, it will sell bonds against that amount. So I’m just going to use very small numbers, this is not the real thing, but let’s say it spends 100 million and it takes in 90 million, then it’s going to sell 10 million worth of bonds. And those bonds that it sells, that 10 million is the deficit for the year. And that 10 million in bonds will contribute to the overall debt.

Manda: So we have to explain to people what bonds are, because the vigilante bond market seems to be the thing that everyone’s afraid of. And so tell us what a bond is and who buys them and where that money goes. Because I think that’s quite important to.

Colleen: A bond is a piece of paper, or a digital piece of paper, that says: so I’m the US government; here’s a bond for $1 million. It means Manda, I’m going to sell you this bond now. So you’re going to give me $1 million, and in ten years, or whatever the term is on the bond, there’ll be a term and a fixed rate of interest. So in ten years, I will give you this money back at a 2% rate of interest, say. So the holders of the bonds are also getting interest. And this is often what’s problematised, is the interest that’s paid out on the national debt. And this is a real thing, right. So if you go back 100 years or so, it was more normal that bonds were held by middle income households domestically, and the interest was paid to those households. It was a way of holding your savings, a safe way of holding your savings. That’s not the case anymore.

Manda: And it was very, very safe. That was the thing, because the government of the UK or the US was considered very, very unlikely to go bankrupt. So you might decide to buy shares in company X, but company X may go bust. You buy government bonds and you might get less interest than you would from company X, but you’re going to get the interest at the point when they said they were going to give you the interest; it will happen, so it’s a very safe way of of storing your money in a capitalist economy where growth is a thing. Nowadays, though, most of government bonds are bought up by things like pension funds. Whenever I talk to somebody about the fact that as far as I am concerned, one of the fastest ways out of the problem we have at the moment is just to decide that governments can spend whatever they want, and they don’t necessarily have to have the same currency. Let’s say if dollars ceased to be valuable tomorrow, people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and all of the crypto fascists currently destroying the US and trying to destroy the world, would be no more than sad individuals hooked on ketamine the day after. But you say that to anybody and they go completely white and they go, but what about my pension? And this seems to be a huge thing, is that pension funds have now invested in government bonds. Am I right?

Colleen: A huge amount of the the money that flows through financial markets comes from pension funds. And this actually kind of gets us into this growth question, because I think in the UK and certainly in the US, you have financialized pensions. So you pay into your pension and that goes into financial markets and you get out what the returns from the financial market are when it’s time for you to take your pension. It’s quite different in some other parts of Europe, for example. So in Austria it’s what’s called a PayGo pension scheme, which just means everyone who’s working pays the state and then the state pays everyone who’s in pension, it doesn’t go through financial markets.

Manda: Okay. Which is great while you have more people working than you have who have retired. And when it goes the other way up and you have fewer people working than you have retired, the government just has to make some more money out of nothing.

Colleen: Exactly.

Manda: Which should not be a problem.

Colleen: So this is only problematic if you think the government is constrained in their capacity to make money. And there are constraints, but those constraints are real resource constraints, they’re not some imagined limit of some bad guys in the bond market, or some magic number that’s going to say, okay, if your debt is more than 60% of your GDP, your whole economy is going to implode, right? This is clearly not the case. It’s not the reality.

Manda: Well, it shouldn’t be the case. But when Liz Truss tried to do it in the UK, the bond markets did actually destroy her. She did have, you know, less of a lifespan than a lettuce, as demonstrated by the webcam on the lettuce, because the vigilante bond markets went no. And she was going to give the money to the banks. It wasn’t that she was doing amazing, good social things, she was just going to give unconstrained pay to banks. And the bond markets went, no, you can’t do that and brought her down.

Colleen: And here’s where the role of the central bank is so critical. Because if the Bank of England said, we’re going to step in and we’re going to buy gilts as needed to stabilise their value, then it would have been unproblematic. We can go even deeper with this. We can make the point that governments don’t actually need to issue bonds for that difference between what they take in and what they spend.

Manda: No they don’t.

Colleen: This is a ceremonial institution. There’s no need to do that.

Manda: No, it kind of maintains the fiction. This is where I get to, is this is a myth. It’s an actual lie. And of all people, Henry Ford, who was an actual neo-Nazi or actual Nazi in fact, said if ordinary people understood how money was created, there would be revolution by tomorrow. And we get back to this. First of all, people still think that the government printing pounds and coins is how the government makes money, and less than 3% of the circulating economy is actual physical money these days, and all the rest is imaginary money that basically exists on a screen. And the government can make as much as they want, with the only limitation being inflation. But they have this narrative that they can’t. And they have the political impact of the bond markets; if the bond markets say they can’t, it seems to have real world political impact, at least in the UK. And I’m kind of imagining it might in the US, although the interesting thing in the US is that bond markets, like President Trump, so he seems to be able to do high wire acts with the economy that nobody else could get away with.

Colleen: Well, bond market’s like US treasuries, right. Because the US is the top of the international monetary system. These are considered the world’s safe asset. But let’s talk about these limits a bit more for a second. So there’s the role of bond vigilantes, but then there’s also these self-imposed political limits. I’m sitting in the EU, in the eurozone, we have the Stability and Growth Pact, which are limits on debt and deficit levels.

Manda: Same in the UK.

Colleen: And what’s really interesting is during the pandemic, the escape clause was initiated, these were put on hold. So we realised we had to take all this really necessary social spending, so we’re just going to put our politically imposed limits on hold for a couple of years. You guys spend and then there was a big debate about how to bring them back online. And there was a coalition within the EU that said, hey, let’s exempt climate and social spending from these limits. And then there was a bigger coalition that Germany was a part of, of course, which said no. Fiscal discipline is what matters. And they won out.

Manda: But what fiscal discipline? Why?

Colleen: I mean, that’s a really good question. Why fiscal discipline? I think it’s largely ideological. I mean, these are people that studied neoclassical economics, and they were taught this idea of if you print more money, you will get inflation, this will be bad for the economy.

Manda: And they haven’t stopped to think about that one. Okay, this feels to me really important.

Colleen: But then they also know it’s not true. Because we have another pause now for military spending in the EU, with what’s going on with Ukraine and then not feeling that we can rely on the US for support. There’s now another exemption and 15 countries have applied for it so far, where you just spend whatever you want in military spending and we say, okay, we’ll ignore that and won’t count it for the rules. So the idea is that these limits are there because it’ll be damaging for the economy when you go beyond them. We’re clearly showing that that’s not the case. And people clearly know that it’s not actually the case. But we still maintain this rhetorically.

Manda: So I have a really serious question here, because it’s the same in the UK. And way back in 2014, Positive Money did a survey with the people who were then members of the UK Parliament, so elected members of parliament, and they found that fewer than 10% of them actually understood how money works. And the rest just take what they’re told. And I have friends, highly intelligent friends who read The Economist, who genuinely believe that if the government spends money, we will have runaway inflation and all hell will break loose. If you actually paid people a little bit more, runaway inflation happens. And I still don’t know. I have friends who are MPs now, so I don’t think they’re all uniformly stupid, but I do think we have a system that elects people not based on their capacity to have good bandwidth around these things. We elect people based on their capacity to chant various slogans as if they believed them, and very possibly they do believe them. So I don’t know what it’s like in the EU, but in the UK we have austerity back and it is an ideological choice. And yet Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer are behaving as if the constraints on their spending were actual, real physical laws like gravity. And you and I know that they’re not. And I don’t know whether they just don’t understand and somebody kind of runs little conceptual rings around them and goes, oh, you can spend as much as you like on defence, because 1. We need to. 2. It will make you look big. 3. The Daily Mail will really be happy. And don’t worry, we’ll make the figures work. And they just are too stupid to understand what’s going on. Or whether they see that spending money on defence actually makes rich people very, very much richer and doesn’t really change anything socially and they’re quite happy with that. Feel free to tell me what you think about that.

Colleen: I think the point you made initially is quite important. That most people in power don’t actually understand how money is created and how the monetary system works. Genuinely don’t. There’s a brilliant documentary called Finding the Money, which follows a lot of MMT scholars, but also speaks to a lot of people in the US political system and people in the highest levels of the central Bank and the Treasury are asked very basic questions about money creation and just don’t know what’s going on.

Manda: They don’t get it.

Colleen: So it’s that. And then there is certainly the element of the system as it is benefits particular people. And making some exemptions like to military spending obviously is going to benefit very powerful vested interests. So I think it’s these, but this is also why I think we’re starting to see a crack in this idea of just money as a commodity, as this neutral, apolitical thing. The great financial crisis started that. It was amplified with the pandemic. And there’s starting to be a shift in this narrative. And I think there needs to be a political pressure to really take back control of the monetary system as a public good. Right?

Manda: Yes.

Colleen: Because money is always political and it should be treated as a public good. And that needs to be like a core element of social and ecological campaigning, resistance, activism. But people are often scared to talk about about money. It’s an intimidating topic.

Manda: Because it feels intimidating. Okay. And I really want to go on to your ideas of how we can use it as a public good. But before we go there, I would like to take a little dive down the rabbit hole of inflation. Because there is a narrative that if the government spends more than its self-imposed limits, inflation will run rampant. And everyone who’s in government at the moment, over a certain age remembers. I remember when interest rates were 18%. I had a mortgage with an interest rate of 1.8%, which was horrible. It was a much smaller mortgage than now, though. And the people currently in power also remember in the UK the winter of discontent, the time when inflation was running rampant and we had to revalue the pound. And they are really afraid of that for genuine reasons. But my understanding, and I really want you to correct this, is that inflation is not caused by paying working people more. Inflation is caused when things like the fossil fuel price, so I had a look this morning just to check at the the graph of commodity prices, but particularly fossil fuel prices, particularly oil prices and inflation. And they absolutely map as in if oil price goes up, inflation goes up soon.

Manda: And it’s not that people are paid more and then inflation happens. It’s that inflation is happening, people need more money and inflation carries on until something happens to bring the oil price down. And this seemed to happen as far as I can tell post Covid. Everybody says that the oil price started rising when Russia invaded Ukraine and it did not. It started rising two weeks after all of the important people met together at Cop26 in Glasgow, and I am assuming had a lot of very interesting conversations, and the price started doing that. And yes, then a major oil producer invaded another major oil producer, and they had free license to ramp up the price as much as they wanted. But everything in our economy depends on oil. And until we can decouple that, the people who control the oil price control the level of inflation, and we have very little that we can do about that, short of the things that were in that article that you sent me. So first of all, am I right about inflation? And second, let’s look at the ways that governments could squish it a bit.

Colleen: Yes. And let me take one step back first, though. So I was saying how we have these politically imposed limits on fiscal spending that aren’t necessary. They’re clearly politically imposed and we just ignore them when it’s convenient to ignore them. And there’s not necessarily any economic consequences for this. So I think it’s important to understand what are the real limits to fiscal spending. And inflation is one of those. Spending can cause inflation, but it’s not some kind of mechanistic relationship; you put more money in the economy and then you get inflation. If you have the real resources and the productive capacity to absorb that spending, then you can have stable prices. So that important. I would say that another real limit is understanding the ecological limits and our spending being embedded within our ecological limits.

Colleen: Okay. So those are real limits to spending that matter and that we need to be very aware of. So if we need to be aware of inflation, we have to understand what inflation is and what actually causes it. It’s not just too much money chasing too few goods; some magical relationship between the quantity of money and prices. How are prices set? Prices are strategically administered by businesses, usually in oligopolistic markets. Which means there’s just a handful of very powerful businesses that are setting the prices for that sector, and everyone else follows those prices. We had decades of relative price stability, and there were times when business costs went up, but they absorbed those costs in other ways and didn’t raise prices. The pandemic was an interesting situation, in that obviously you have these massive economic shutdowns across the globe.

Manda: A shock to everything.

Colleen: And we have these very pointed supply chain bottlenecks. And with that, there’s a lot of discourse around inflation. It’s in the media, there’s the general expectation that prices are going to go up. And what this does is give companies agency to raise prices without there being some kind of negative reaction, without people sort of rebelling or saying, you know, we’re no longer going to be customers because this doesn’t seem valid or fair. There’s a general expectation that prices are going to go up, and then many companies take advantage of this and raise prices above and beyond their increase in costs, so they increase their profit margins.

Manda: Did they do that during the pandemic, or did they do it after? Because it seemed to me that during the pandemic, actually, things stayed relatively stable, that it was only after the pandemic that that things began to shoot up. Am I wrong in that?

Colleen: I think it depends on when we mark the end of the pandemic, but I would say it was the latter portion of the pandemic and then very much through Russias war in Ukraine.

Manda: Yes.

Colleen: And you’re speaking to oil, right. And when we look at energy, the cost of energy, this is what Isabella Weber refers to as a ‘systemically significant price’. That means the cost of energy is an input into pretty much every other sector, every good and service, whatever you’re doing. There’s probably energy costs behind it. So if energy is more expensive, everything else is going to get more expensive. So if the cost of oil goes up, this is going to drive price increases across the board, and we see this consistently. There’s also other prices that are quite critical: food prices, housing prices, basically the prices of things that people need to get by on a day to day basis. They need to pay their rent, they need to feed their families, they need energy costs to light and heat their home or to fuel their cars or whatever it is that they use to get around. So these costs, these are non-discretionary. So if prices go up, I can’t say, oh, well, I’ll just get some Y instead of X. I can’t. I need food, I have to pay my rent, I have to pay my energy bill.

Colleen: So these are non-discretionary cost increases and lower income households get hit the hardest by these, because more of their spending is on these essential items. Higher income households spend a greater proportion of their income on luxury items or things that they could just choose not to buy, or buy different things. But low income households or pensioners, they do not have this option. So when we have inflation it’s very disproportionate how the effects hit different groups of people. It’s highly inequitable.

Manda: Yes. It tends not to affect the luxury yacht market that much, but it completely affects whether the price of potatoes or eggs, as we saw in the US, the price of eggs was a significant talking point in last year’s election.

Colleen: Exactly.

Manda: Two things that struck me. One is I noticed during the pandemic there was the great resignation, which is a whole bunch of people going, you know what? I really enjoy not having to work so much. And I feel okay about that. And I wonder, I have a theory which I cannot test, that one of the reasons inflation spiked so high and so hard once actual lockdown ended; so people could go back to work but we’re choosing largely not to, and suddenly prices went up and they had to go back to work. That there was quite deliberate. And as you’re saying, we have oligopolies. We have seven major companies own most of everything in the world, and I’m pretty sure they talk to each other of we do not want people to realise that they don’t have to go to work. We don’t want there to be a choice. Therefore, if we hike prices by 10, 20, 30%, people will have to go back to work, because as you say, they have to pay their rent, they have to pay for food. So we have that as one side. But then you sent me a really fascinating paper in foreign affairs and I hadn’t realised but Mexico and Spain both instigated anti-inflationary measures that completely worked. These were political entities that decided that they were not going to let people hike food prices and power prices and put up rents. They just were going to stop that from happening. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? And then we’ll get on to how we’re going to solve the ecological crisis through modern monetary theory and degrowth, which is what we came to talk about, but I think we needed the background first.

Colleen: Yeah. So first, what has been our standard response to inflation from 1980 onwards, has been to use the central bank to hike interest rates to induce a recession and increase unemployment. And this will bring down inflation, but coming back to inequitable effects obviously this is affecting those with precarious employment or low income households much, much harder.

Manda: And I have a question, because it’s not going to bring down inflation. If the OPEC countries decide to take the cost of a barrel of oil from $40, which it was during the pandemic, to $128, which it was in the early months of the Ukraine war; that every single thing we do from from growing food, food at the moment, industrial agriculture is basically the process of turning oil into food. Building houses is the process of turning oil into construction. Everything we do depends on oil. If the oil price goes up by that much, it doesn’t really matter how many people are employed, inflation is going to be there anyway. Do you not think? I mean, provided you have some kind of unemployment benefit.

Colleen: So there is some demand sensitivity in the oil market, even though it is an oligopolistic market. You can still see responses to demand in terms of the pricing.

Manda: Okay. So if everybody loses their job the oil price will drop a bit.

Colleen: People won’t be able to even bother to put gas in their car.

Manda: Okay. Or heat their home or eat. Yeah.

Colleen: So recessions are an effective way to address inflation. They’re just also a horrible way to address inflation. What we saw with the cost of living crisis was actually some interesting novel fiscal policy responses. So instead of the central bank raising interest rates, we saw elected branches of government trying out different ways to maintain price stability and importantly, to maintain price stability around these key goods. So you mentioned Spain. What Spain did is put a windfall profit tax on energy companies and on the banking sector. So profits above and beyond what they had been making, these were taxed away. And this was very effective. They also had some other interesting policies. They made public transit free, I think short and mid-distance public transit was made free through a lot of Spain, which is a wonderful decommodify, right. Access to key needs satisfied. People need to get around, just make that so it’s no longer mediated through the market. That’s brilliant. That’s a wonderful response.

Colleen: In Mexico Amlo’s government brought together different food processing and grocery store oligopolies and negotiated price moderation with them. They said, here’s this basket of essential essential foods, and we’re going to fix a price for that basket. And almost everyone signed on to this, and they were really public about it. And then those grocery stores that didn’t sign on to it, people stopped using them, because there was really this public campaign around look, we’re working together to make sure that you can access the food that you need to feed your family.

Manda: Yeah. And they used public television.

Colleen: And the electoral responses in Spain and Mexico were, I mean, these governments stayed in power. Whereas everywhere else effectively you saw a switch and you saw a switch towards more right wing governments. There were two studies that were done, one looking at the US and one at the EU. The one on the EU showed a connection between people, households experiencing strong episodes of inflation and a tendency towards shifting towards right wing parties. And in the US there was a connection made between experiencing inflation and shifting towards voting Republican.

Manda: Which is a right wing party. So yes.

Colleen: Yes!

Manda: And partly it’s because they were the parties who were not in power and we’re just going for the other guy, whoever the other guy is. Because in the UK they went from the Tories, who are right wing, to Labour, who were equally right wing but were pretending not to be. And it was just whoever it was that was in power, when life got bad we want the other people. And the fact that the other people subscribed to exactly the same myths and hold themselves to the same ridiculous limits seems to bypass. And partly I think it bypasses, because at least in the UK and probably in the EU and the US, all of the political and economic commentators in the legacy media; so on television and in the newspaper, all did politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford or Cambridge. And they are neoliberals to the core. So they are asking the questions of, well, how are you going to manage spending and the debt? Instead of what are you going to do with your capacity to make money to, first of all, help people’s lives, and second, make sure we don’t destroy the entire world ecosystem. So having got there (see, I managed it!) How are we going to… Your papers, your chapter are a wonderful bridge between modern monetary theory, which is broadly what we’ve been talking about, and degrowth economics and ecological economics. And that bridge I had not seen being made before. So this episode may end up being a little longer than we had thought it was going to be, because it’s taken longer than I imagined to get there.

Manda: But this feels really important. We have established that governments can spend as much as they like within certain limits, but they have tools to limit inflation that are not based on constraining their own spending. And that growth in the economy, which at the moment is required so that we can all make enough money to pay interest on the money that we borrowed, because most of the money supply comes from banks making money out of nothing and lending it to us at interest. Which is to say, they make a profit out of stuff they’ve made out of nothing. I want everyone listening to remember that one! We have given banks license to invent money and sell it to us, and we think this is okay. And we tell the governments to spend less, and then the banks have to spend more or the money supply falls away. So you want to maintain the money supply, either the government spends more into existence or the banks lend more into existence, there is no other way that money comes into existence. Then we pay taxes and they take it out and destroy it. Anyway, we’ve established that. So the other constraint, you said one constraint is inflation, the other is we are destroying the biosphere, and we need to be spending on different things in different ways if we’re going to find a way for humanity to flourish within a flourishing biosphere. Talk to us about that.

Colleen: Yeah. So we need to reduce our levels of consumption and production. We need to reduce our total energy and material throughput to be within planetary boundaries and when ecological limits more broadly. And that means a reduction in economic activity. So how do we do that in a way that actually promotes human flourishing and more than human flourishing? And that is that is equitable and democratic and localised. So how in the world do we do this? And a question you’ll run up against right off the top, is if the economic activity is being reduced, the tax intake is being reduced. So the government can’t pay to do all the things it needs. It can’t pay to build out renewable energy infrastructure or to get people good jobs. And once we understand money and the monetary system and the fact that the government creates money and we understand what our real constraints are, that blows away that response. We can afford to build out the infrastructure, to pay for the jobs that we need to actually reduce economic activity and adjust in an equitable way, right? And so what does that look like? Well, in part that looks like building out systems of universal public services. It involves utilising fiscal spending to decommodify the stuff that we need on a day to day basis. Education is usually decommodified in most countries, so that one’s obvious to people. You’re in the UK, so healthcare through the NHS is decommodified, but this can be funded much more robustly than it is now. We can decommodify public transportation, housing, building out systems of local agricultural, biodynamic agricultural systems, things like this. And this can be supported by a federal job guarantee, because the government can afford to pay to employ people, to build out the things we actually need to build. Degrowth doesn’t mean we do the same thing we’re doing now and we do less of it, right?

Colleen: It means it’s a totally different economy, a totally different way of relating to each other. And that means some things will grow and some things will shrink, right? But we need more care, we need more care work, we need more elderly care, we need more child care. We need more green spaces, we need better renewable energy infrastructure. So there’s plenty of work to be done. And if the private sector doesn’t deem that work profitable, then the government can pay people to do that work. And you can do that in a way that is localised and takes people where they’re at and works with what their capacities are. So maybe that’s building out cultural programs or art programs for the community. Maybe that’s care work. I mean, everyone has wonderful, valuable things to contribute, right? It’s just a matter of letting the people who are a part of that community decide what the community needs and what valuable ways they can contribute. And then having that funding come from a federal level to support that program. We have the capacity to do this. And then also that can then complement building out these universal public services that I’m talking about.

Manda: So let’s just talk a little bit about universal public services, because we talk a lot about universal basic income on this podcast. And I have mentioned once in a while Universal Basic Services, which seems to me a much better way of doing things than universal basic income for a lot of reasons. Partly universal basic income without universal rent controls is a very fast way of shifting public money into private hands. Universal basic services means that the basics become free or next to free. Correct? And so can we list what we would consider to be basic services: I’ll go with health, food, decent housing. And I think one of my questions becomes how do we define decent and how do we make sure that’s equitable. Because not everybody wants to live on the 13th floor of a high rise. There has to be a better way. Water. We have privatised water in this country and it’s an absolute utter nightmare. How do we decide what food is essential and what is a luxury? So we’ve got power. I would suggest broadband these days is pretty much a universal, necessary basic service. Transport. And transport in an intelligent way. We’re not talking about buses that you stand at a bus stop and wait for three hours and then three turn up. We’re talking about the AI tells you that you’re going from A to B, and six other people are going from A to B, and a thing that can take 6 or 7 people, turns up and takes you from A to B and goes on and does something else, and it’s much more efficient. Plus we have a lot of bicycles. Every single time any group of us sits down and envisions the future, we have car free spaces. Everybody imagines car free spaces when they look into the future. So that seems a no brainer. What else would you have as universal basic services?

Colleen: I think it’s important that we’re not too prescriptive here. What we can clearly do on the federal level is provide the funding, but it’s up to the communities where these services are being built out to decide what that vision looks like for them. And there needs to be some parameters around the sustainability of it. Moving away from fossil fuel reliance, things like this. But visions for what what care spaces might look like or what the right form of public transit is in one region might be different from another and there needs to be space for this. We need to reclaim agency in creating our economies. And this comes through public budgeting, forms of monetary democracy, economic democracy. But this also ties to this idea of understanding that the monetary system and the economy are things we create. And then, okay, how can we actually take that agency back and shaping these things and making them our own?

Manda: Okay. So we have participatory budgeting, for instance, and distributed local democracies so that people can make the decisions that are appropriate for their local areas.

Colleen: Yeah, perhaps supported by public banks.

Manda: Right. That’s probably a whole extra podcast. Let’s put that aside just now, because public banks are really interesting but I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. Because I’m really interested in why that hasn’t happened already. And the answers seem to me ideological and political. And there is a lot of vested interest who really likes the fact that we exist in a system that takes value and siphons it to a few people at the top. And I am watching in the UK particularly, we’re recording this four days after Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana set up the framework to create a new party. It’s not a party yet, but it’s going to be a party of the left. Within 48 hours, 500,000 people had signed up and the main news outlets have not mentioned it. And I imagine if 500,000 people had signed up to reform, which is the the super right party, it would be headlines everywhere. So we’re pushing against the tide of an existing political economy, and I don’t imagine it’s going to get any easier. How do you envisage the Democratic power shift that would enable us to enact what you’re suggesting?

Colleen: So I think there’s lessons we can draw from what we talked about with the way Spain and Mexico responded to inflation. Because what they did was say, we see that you’re you’re not able to access food, energy, housing, and that’s important. And we are going to aggressively step in to make sure you can access the basic things you need. And so speaking to that, speaking to our basic needs, and doing it in a way that’s powerful, that’s not saying, oh no, we’re limited by bond markets. We’re limited by the set rules. Say no, we have the capacity to make sure everyone who wants a job has a job. We have the capacity to properly fund the NHS. We have the capacity to build out equitable social housing. This is concretely how we’re going to do this. Just be really bold and address very concretely people’s basic needs. And when you do this and when you do this through public systems, and we can see this empirically, is less resource and energy intensive than the private alternatives that we currently rely on to meet those needs.

Manda: Mexico has a state power company. Because where I get to if I play this forward, if I were writing the novel of this, is that the oligarchs look at what’s happening and they hike the price of oil and they go, oh, no, public spending causes inflation. Look, this is bad. This government is destroying you and they take the government down. And I could imagine that happening in about six weeks, because they just need to spike the price of oil. And the narrative makers in the current legacy media will flip the narrative so that public spending becomes the reason for the inflation, not the fact that they just doubled the barrel price of oil. And so it seems to me that one of the things that would need to happen, if this were happening at a national scale, very early would be nationalisation of power companies. And I think that would be a very interesting political move. And then we would discover how much power an individual nation state actually has. Can you see a way where it happens without that?

Colleen: It would depend on the country, but there would be capacity to try and enact price controls. And that could happen through the government making up the difference, or it could happen by saying we’re not going to let you import these goods unless you meet this price that we’re setting, and our market is big enough that you’re going to be willing to do that. So it kind of depends on what economy we’re talking about and what leverage they have. But there are other tools. But I absolutely think long term nationalising energy is quite important for price stability and ensuring access to having our basic needs met.

Manda: Yeah. And possibly bringing it into community ownership. I don’t particularly think governments are very good at running companies, but community ownership is a much better thing.

Colleen: Yeah. Actually, nationalising wasn’t the right term, but making public.

Manda: Public ownership. Yes. And I think that probably is a whole other podcast too. Because what we’re seeing in the US, I think is really interesting. Okay, let’s assert the fact that I believe Trump to be actually insane. However, the tariffs that he is enacting, the theory behind them is that it will bring all manufacturing into the US, that they will wear an amount of pain as the tariff costs are completely reflected in prices that are passed on to the public. But in the end, people will stop importing things that have high tariffs and start creating them in the US. That is predicated on the belief that it’s possible to create them in the US, and that US citizens will really want to work in sweatshops, making, say, Nike trainers, that they will never be able to afford to buy, as happens in the places that currently make various items that the people who make them, cannot afford to buy. The whole thing hasn’t really been very well thought through, but it is an interesting look at the power that a big government has to shift commodity prices. And I wonder, is there a sane way? So you suggested price limitations. I remember reading Christian Felber’s economy for the Common Good, which was basically, we’re going to create a taxation structure for all companies based on their capacity to meet social and environmental limits that we set. So how many women do you have on your board? How many not straight white men do you have on your board? How much are you creating waste that has impact on the environment and how much are you working to have an actual internal circular economy within your company. That kind of thing. And we will set your level of taxation based on how you are behaving. And I wonder, is that a thing that is integrated into the way that you see things, or do you see other ways governments can intervene?

Colleen: So taxation can certainly play a role. And it also matters what’s the political viability of different taxation strategies at a given place and time. Because in a lot of countries there’s not a lot of political traction for more aggressive taxation. But we also need to consider what are these commodities we’re talking about, these key commodities? Where do we rely on imports and how can we build out domestic capacity? How can we build up domestic energy sovereignty, domestic food sovereignty? So that there is domestic public control of these resources. And obviously this is also shaped by what country we’re talking about, you know, their ability to do these things. But I think that’s a really important element as well, this localising economic production, particularly with key commodities and energy as well.

Colleen: And renewable energy gives us the capacity to do this. But the more we continue to just rely on economic growth, the more it just kneecaps our capacity to do this. So if we’re saying, okay, yeah, we’re going to try and transition to renewables, but at the same time we’re drawing on more and more energy every year, then we’re just running up a down escalator. So the more we can intentionally and equitably reduce our energy consumption and shift away from fossil fuels, We’re just making our job easier here.

Manda: Yes. And not just power. But we need to limit commodities because we did a few podcasts the January before last with Simon Michaux, and he said that he looked at the EU’s plans for renewables and that they would get through the same amount of copper as we have mined in the totality of human history in the next 22 years. And so one of the things that seems to me is we have to quite intelligently, not just draw down our power use, but draw down our commodity use, while at the same time enhancing people’s lives, because that has to be a thing. And we have been hooked on to a narrative that said the only way people’s lives are enhanced is by economic growth, and what I’m reading in your work is we can enhance the things that really matter: connectivity, connection, community, well-being, without economic growth. Can you speak a little bit to that?

Colleen: Yeah. I mean, this goes back to understanding the economy is something we created, right? And then asking the question of what do we want out of the economy? What is our aim, what is meaningful to us? We’ve been fed the story that consumption is what somehow brings meaning or what meets our needs, as opposed to understanding it as these externally created wants, to fill some void, because we don’t have more substantial and meaningful modes of connection and agency and interaction, and of shaping the communities that we live in. So a degrowth economy is oriented towards human flourishing. Towards understanding that the ways we relate, these different economic modes, aren’t fixed or aren’t given or aren’t naturalised. So is market exchange the way we want to go about everything? No. Probably not. Might it have some role? Sure, but maybe we want more spaces of commoning, of reciprocity, of other ways of relating. And understanding that these are economic as well, is really, really important to expanding more broadly our understanding of what we think of the economy and what we think it can be and what we want it to be. And so when we’re focusing on connection, meaning agency, relationship, these things are aren’t materially intensive. They’re time intensive. And that’s a very different way of understanding what’s what’s valuable.

Manda: Yes. Okay. There’s so much else I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about your workshops with Katie Shields. So I know you have two other workshops coming up. Tell us about those very briefly, and then we’ll let you go.

Colleen: Yeah. So there’s two workshops coming up that I’m helping out with. One is put on by Modern Money Lab that will be in Vienna on September 27th and 28. And that’s public money for public good and that’s really firmly grounded in Modern Monetary theory.

Manda: Brilliant.

Colleen: Another is a Regenerative Economy Lab workshop that Katie Shields leads and that I’m just supporting, which is on money and finance and regenerative finance. And that’s October 23rd and 24th.

Manda: And is that online?

Colleen: They’re both in person.

Manda: Both in person. And where is the second one?

Colleen: They’re both in person in Vienna. The Modern Monetary Lab is running a couple of these workshops in the UK as well, so I can send you info on that.

Manda: Oh yes, so we will have links in the show notes.

Colleen: They just recently started a modern money lab UK group organisation.

Manda: Oh how exciting! Because I read your LinkedIn post, Katie’s post about having done this in a permaculture space, and how much better people were able to understand how different an economy could be when they had the capacity to go outside and link with the web of life, the natural world. And that that completely shifted people’s mindsets so that it was much easier to take in what are quite complicated concepts about how the world is and how money works. So that sounds very exciting.

Colleen: Yeah. It just allows you to embody knowledge in a different way, when you’re sitting around a fireplace surrounded by trees and the sky overhead.

Manda: Yes, yes. Colleen, thank you so much. It’s been amazing, I love this. I would really like to talk to you again, probably in spring of next year or thereabouts, because I think there’s a lot we didn’t go into, and I think there’s lots more depth we could get to. But for now, thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. I hope everybody else out there is feeling much more economically literate than they were at the start. Thank you.

Colleen: Thank you so much for having me.

Manda: So there we go. That’s it for another week. Enormous thanks to Colleen for all that she is and does. For so eloquently and intelligently bringing together Modern Monetary Theory, degrowth theory and ecological economics, to build an outline of how we can get from where we are to where we need to be. For exposing the lies that underpin the way our economy is currently set up. Speaking as someone in the UK, I genuinely hope that the new political party, whatever it is called, takes this on board and we can begin to challenge the ways that we frame the economy, the ways that we frame the government’s spending decisions. I want to make it really clear, I hope it was clear in the podcast, but that our current economy is based on a pair of lies. And the first is that the economy has to grow. And the second is that government spending is limited by the money we take in as taxes. These are wholly untrue. And what Colleen has done in her papers, in the chapter that she’s written for a forthcoming book, and I hope in this podcast, is to lay bare the nature of those lies. The government can spend what it chooses to spend, and it can modify the nature of inflation by choosing to take in taxes. That doesn’t stop the inflationary pressures of the oil prices. Somehow we need to take control of how power is monetised. While the fossil fuel companies can hold all of us to ransom by choosing to kick up the prices whenever they feel like it, then we are in deep trouble and we need to change this. But changing the nature of the power that we use, how much we use when we use it, and where we source it, is part of the regenerative change that we need to see, that we need to create.

Manda: If we’re going to hand over a decent future to the generations that come after us, it cannot rest on the whims of fossil fuel companies, who basically only see an ATM and an enormous amount of money that they can take out and do with as they choose. One of the fossil fuel companies, I think it was BP, said recently that they have more money than they know what to do with. They could be doing useful stuff with it, and they’re not. Partly because they don’t know what’s useful, I think, and partly because they’re just basically unable to imagine a different way of doing things. So we need to make that imaginal process not impossible. On the topic of which Colleen has sent me details of a number of workshops that are running in person in Vienna. But there are also workshops being run by Modern Money Lab around the world and in UK there is one in Sheffield on the 20th and 21st of September. So if you are listening to this podcast when it first comes out, you can get to that one if you’re in the UK. And please check out the websites for other things that you can do online. There’s a master’s program on which Colleen teaches that is grounded jointly in ecological economics and modern monetary theory. And to be clear, modern monetary theory is a way of looking at economics that says governments spend money into existence, banks lend money into existence, and that taxation is a way of evening things out, not a necessary prerequisite to government spending money.

Manda: I really hope that’s clear by now. Okay, so that’s it. We’re done. Please go and check out all of the links. Please read Colleen’s papers. They’re wonderful. They’re really clear. And understanding how money works is fundamental to all of us. Kind of like understanding how we can create regenerative food and farming processes; we all need to eat. We also all exist in a network that spends money, and it does not have to be the commodification of suffering. It doesn’t have to be spent in the way current governments choose to spend it. If we can take back that power, if we can bring power to those with wisdom, if we can change the way that we understand how this particular human resource and human agreement is made, then we change everything. So let’s go for it, eh? Share the links, read the papers, change the way we hold the conversations.

Manda: And we will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, enormous thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot, to Alan Lowles of Airtight studios for the production, Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcripts, Faith Tilleray for the website and wrestling with the tech and all of the conversations that keep us moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody who spends money, then please do send them this link. They will appreciate it in the long run, I do sincerely hope. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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