#1 MMT and ‘Finding the Money’

Welcome to the Voices of Franklin podcast. I'm Stephen Williams and today I'm talking to U.S. documentary maker Maren Poitras who in September 2023 had the world premiere of her feature-length film Finding the Money. The film explores the principles behind a controversial approach to macroeconomics called modern monetary theory and what it has to say about the history and nature of money, money creation, taxes, banking and other things that deeply affect our everyday lives. Now if the mainstream has this all wrong, as MMT claims, it helps to explain the mess we find ourselves in now. The film features most MMT co-founders, and leading experts so it provides an accurate if introductory analysis. Since recording this interview we have new information about film screenings in Tasmania so be sure to check the show notes on our website. Today we're joined by Maren Poitras from the United States. Maren is a documentary filmmaker. She's just made her directorial debut with a film with the intriguing title Finding the Money. Maren Poitras, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me Stephen. Yeah, it's great to join you. Probably a good idea to tell the listener succinctly what your film's all about. Can you do that? Yeah, yeah. So it's about this kind of underdog group of economists who are basically trying to instigate a paradigm shift to change how we, you know, really flip upside down our understanding of the national debt and really the nature of money itself. And of course it's based in the US but it's very applicable I think to any other country that uses money and especially Australia. You know, I just kind of replace the US dollar with Australian dollar and you're pretty much there. And so yeah, I think, you know, that's it in a nutshell. But, you know, we follow Stephanie Kelton, former Chief Economist for Senator Bernie Sanders and the US Senate Budget Committee. And so she's kind of leading the charge of this group that's trying to change economics in a lot of ways and really in the context of what can we do in the face of, you know, our biggest challenges, I think, which are, you know, climate change and inequality, these kind of social environmental challenges. And, you know, what can we really afford to do as a society in the face of those? So I've been lucky enough to get an advanced screening of your documentary. It's about this strange sounding thing called modern monetary theory. And it's a very important debate that's occurring within the economics profession, has been bubbling away for a couple of decades. And as you say, it's very well described by Professor Stephanie Kelton's book, New York Times bestseller, The Deficit Myth, which comes out in, came out in 2020. And in some ways, I thought your documentary fairly closely followed what Professor Kelton is saying in that book. Is that a fair enough description of how you approach the subject? Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know, I guess I didn't, I didn't actually use the book as a model, because I started shooting, you know, before the book came out and through the editing process, you know, maybe we kind of ended in the same place in a way, because it was like, it was a long process of me and the editing, you know, the editing phase of taking all these kind of scenes and individual ideas that I had edited kind of each scene, and then really moving them around like a jigsaw puzzle, just trying to find the right order to tell this story in film. So yeah, I think, you know, I had all the pieces of the puzzle. And of course, her book is, you know, it's just so excellent to reach a general audience. And that's what the film is trying to do, too, is just kind of break this, break it out and break it down. And so that a general audience can really understand it in a really entertaining and digestible way. And so, so yeah, I think, you know, I didn't base it off the book, but maybe we kind of, through the process, it's like, how do you tell the story? And, you know, I think sometimes, it's nice that there's this, this story arc to the characters and the narrative of really trying to follow them through this process as well. Like first, first they're ignored, then they're ridiculed and laughed at, then they're fought. And then, you know, the question still remains, like, will they win in however we want to define that. And so that was kind of like the backbone of the narrative story arc that I was trying to use. And then being able to use that to hang all these informational pieces as well, like you need a certain puzzle, you know, you need to each piece of the puzzle to kind of fall into place so that you can have hopefully some experiences of revelations or aha moments or things coming together in your own mind about what this is all about and how it's maybe different from what we've been told for quite a long time. Can I ask how you first heard about modern monetary theory? Let's call it MMT from now on, that's what everyone calls it. How did you first hear about it? And how did your kind of background or your interests, how did that intersect with MMT to make you want to make a documentary? Yes, that's a good question. But, you know, I come more from the climate environment background. So I was really trying to understand the big picture issues of climate change and how can we really address it successfully. And at the roots, you know, I was kind of tired of all these what I call, you know, Band-Aid solutions and market oriented solutions and just, just change your consumer habits and buy something different or, you know, turn off the light bulb or buy an EV, you know, I mean, so it's really, you know, wanting to get to the roots of the system. And that, of course, led me to economics, really, you know, they're often juxtaposed the environment versus the economy somehow as if the economy is not within, you know, our sphere of the planet. But, you know, so first I found ecological economics and reading that and then, you know, something just something they said about money and how things create money. And I was like, what? You know, so it just all of a sudden sparked my interest in that eventually through a random circuitous road led me to this group called MMT. And at first, you know, I was like, huh, this sounds kind of weird. But, you know, these folks just based in Kansas City and, you know, they weren't necessarily labeled as, you know, ecological at the time. So but they had the money piece, like they had this coherent understanding of money. And all of a sudden, things started to fall into place for me and started to make sense around how the economy functions, and then how it could also function differently or, you know, how we actually the tools we actually have the capacity we actually have to do something about climate change on a much bigger scale and a much quicker scale than I think we've been led to believe by, let's say, the neoliberal economic paradigm that says, you know, where we've just been spending decades and decades with my, you know, very slow incremental change coming from the private sector having to try to implement these things are through consumer demand. I mean, we're just not, we're not going to get there in time, through that form of thinking. So, so yeah, so it just opens up a whole new paradigm. And it just, it just really drew me in the story as well, right? The conflict and the controversy around why, you know, why is the small group that are saying these things, you know, talking about money, why are they getting so vehemently attacked, like, by the big names in their field of economics, and on Twitter and on social media. And so that also drew me in that, like, you know, what's going on here? And, you know, where can we, can we dig into this a little bit more and find, find the core of the conflict and the core of the argument, and maybe, you know, who's right, or who has more evidence on their side to, to dig into that, you know, dig into that controversy. So, yeah, that all of that, all of that drew me in, the urgency, the stake, the story, all of that. I have a very similar experience to you, Maren, by being someone with a background in or a strong interest in the natural environment and why we keep wrecking it. Eventually, it leads you to a study of economics, I think it has to. And like you, I got interested in ecological economics, and we can talk about that a bit later on, perhaps. And then, again, like you, I just happened to stumble upon MNT and was intrigued by it seemed to be the opposite. They seem to be saying the opposite of what the mainstream say. And you think, hang on, how, how can one group say one thing and the other groups say the opposite? Yeah. But you persist with it, and eventually the penny drops for some of us, at least. And it's fair to say that to really understand how the modern money system works, you really have to learn about the history of money, how it was invented in the first place. And that really helps you understand the seeming paradoxes within the whole thing. Yeah, no, it's a great question, because I do, I feel that way personally. And that's what really helped me, you know, when I first heard about MNT, I was like, okay, you know, maybe, maybe. And, you know, I was still skeptical, but it was just the more I dug, and the more I read, and the more I explored, it was, it really came together for me. I had some of those aha moments, looking at the history of money and learning about tally sticks and learning about, you know, and just the long history of gold and trying to parse out, you know, the gold story of money is so strong in our culture, I think. And so, and I, I think it happened for a lot of MNT economists, they also went back to look at the history and historical writings that aren't aren't as ancient, even, you know, going back to Adam Smith, and a lot of other economists through through the last centuries have talked about similar things that the charterless school, you know, different theories of money that somehow were paved over, or didn't come together as a cohesive theory until MNT came along and kind of put all the pieces together into one basket. And so that, you know, that is what really is a driving question for me with this film is just how could there be these two schools saying something that are really the polar opposites, right, not just slightly different, or, you know, we have a different take. And we have a different, you know, a little different perspective on the implications of this. It's like, no, it's like literally the opposite. So, you know, the literally the opposite description of what is money, where does money come from? What is the government's role in that process and in the economy in general? And what is the market's role? Where does that come from? The implications are huge. And then, especially when you're talking about the national debt, just what is the national debt? That's literally the opposite, you know, of what the mainstream says, and the implications of it are the opposite of it. The implications in terms of interest rates and going bankrupt, and you know, all this stuff we kind of hear every day in coverage. So, so yeah, the history of money is really what helps me and why I do include it. You know, I include a fair amount of these little vignettes and historical illustrations in the film to try and visualize and explore that aspect. Because for me, when I dug into the controversy and the conflict, that's what things went back to. It went back to all the way back to the story we tell about money. Yeah, the classical economists like Adam Smith assumed there was a barter system, and that the barter system became... Yeah. Yeah. And that the barter system was too cumbersome. So somehow the private sector invented money, then the state came along as a parasite to take the private sector's money, whereas the reality is there never was a barter system. The state created money to provision itself, and all money ultimately comes from the state. So yeah, the mainstream would say that money is a limited resource, and it's very valuable. But real resources are more or less infinite, whereas the story is the opposite. Money is the infinite resource. It's just a measure of things like a kilo or a foot or a pound, whether you're metric or not. Whereas it's the real resources that are limited, and that's where real wealth comes from. And it's that understanding that's going to, if anything, get us out of the terrible predicament we find ourselves in as both global society and as nations. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we sometimes see money as so much the obstacle to creating that better world. It's like, we just don't have the money. Maybe we have the resources, we have the know-how, we have the technology, we have the vision, we have all these things, but somehow we just don't have the money to carry it out. I mean, money is just the organizing tool that would help us to do that. It's not the obstacle, it's not the enemy. It's a public tool, it's a public utility that we've created to hopefully help our societies, not hinder them. And so when we're thinking about gold and money as a scarce resource in and of itself, it doesn't make sense. You don't have to go out and dig gold out of the ground in order to build a hospital and train doctors and nurses. It's not an input in that process when you have a society and resources in order to carry that out. So I think, yeah, it is so backwards in terms of what we're valuing and in terms of if we're thinking about a policy priority. Instead of thinking, how expensive is this or how much does this cost in money terms? We really need to shift to how many resources is this using and is that within planetary limits or the limits that we want to set for ourselves and leave some for future generations. And then if you have that different lens to analyze policy priorities, you could think maybe something as expensive in money terms, maybe research and medical research and technology and development, maybe that costs a lot of money, but it maybe doesn't take a lot of resources. It takes education. It takes hiring scientists and doctors and all of this, but maybe that's not very resource intensive, but it is monetarily intensive. But we have to analyze everything from a different perspective, I think, from a societal benefit perspective instead of just this simple cost benefit analysis in terms of money. That's not the cost and the benefits we should be looking at on a societal or planetary scale. Yeah. Your film uses the United States as a case study. It pretty much focuses solely on the United States, but as I think you said before, it applies to all nations, particularly what we call monetary sovereign nations like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Great Britain, Japan. But of course, some nations have given up their monetary sovereignty, haven't they? Nations that now use a common currency or shared currency like the euro. There are countries in Africa that do a similar thing. And some countries even use the United States dollar as their currency, even though they're not the United States. So of course, sometimes you hear a criticism of MMT that it only applies to the United States because the US dollar is the world's reserve currency, but that's not true. The other thing I noticed about your film, a couple of things. First thing was the really high production values, which is sort of movie speak for saying that it looks and sounds terrific. The other thing, you had access to really high profile people in economics and politics in the United States. It must have been quite a thrill to access those people, such important names, many of them. Yeah. And I don't know how I managed it, honestly. You just got to email them and you got to try. So yeah, I was very happy. There were others that I was hoping to get to interview and didn't get to, but I'm really happy with what we were able to reach. And that was my really big goal, wanting to talk to a diversity of economists from a diversity of political perspectives and backgrounds. And also the critics, the people who have openly criticized MMT and try to figure out again, what is the core of this conflict? Where does MMT go wrong in its description of how the monetary system currently works? Because if it is incorrect, we should be able to see, okay, this is where they go wrong. This is where they're incorrectly describing the accounting that occurs between the Fed and the Treasury and what have you. We should be able to get to the bottom of it, right? I mean, this is a system, this is a man-made system. It's not a natural, mysterious phenomenon that we can't explain. It is man-made. So I just feel like we should be able to get to the bottom of it. And unfortunately, through trying to interview a lot of mainstream economists, I was trying to, again, get to the root of the conflict. But for me, I couldn't find those specifics. I couldn't find someone who could point me to where MMT goes wrong exactly. And so it was more these kind of generalities. And it really, again, like I said, it went back to the story we tell about money in terms of what is money and where does it come from? And I think it is easy for us to get lost when we use this term money and we think about it as almost a universal phenomenon or an international phenomenon when it's very bounded by law and by politics. And so I think, as Warren Mulder says, instead of using the word money, we should always replace it with, well, which financial instrument are you referring to? Which currency are you referring to? Because that just helps us make it more concrete or finite in our mind saying, if we're talking about the US dollar, OK, that's a liability of the Fed or what type of dollar you're talking about. And you can always kind of track then what liability and what asset and what credit are you referring to? And we can track that on a balance sheet wherever it is, see where it comes from, see where it goes. If you're just talking about money and, oh, it's kind of this thing that we all need that we have to go out and find, but we don't stop and think, where does it come from? Who issues it? How does that work? That's where the mainstream economists just don't even want to go there. They want to just kind of refer to it as money, and they don't want to think too hard about it, I guess, or not. That's what I was told. I was told just don't ask those questions necessarily. You'll lose the Fed. You'll get confused. And so I think somehow they've managed to stop themselves from asking the basic questions about what is money, where does it come from, money in terms of the US dollar, the Australian dollar, what are you referring to? And then they're able to somehow skip over that and move on to the complicated calculus. And I don't know how they do that exactly, but they do. Well, those high-profile economists also want to protect their legacy, protect their life's work. They don't want to say, sorry, folks, we got this all wrong for whatever reason. That's human nature, right? It just goes to show how hard it is to make paradigm shifts, whether it's in economics or even the natural sciences sometimes, even though the natural sciences are more amenable to being open to falsifiability, not so much in something like economics, which is more akin to philosophy and ideology plays a big part, and even morality plays a big part when you get down to it. Now, Maren, your film's been doing the film festival circuit in the US since, I think, you had your worldwide premiere in, was it September last year, at the Woodstock Film Festival. You've been winning a few awards, I noticed. And what I'm interested in is the audience reaction to people who have never heard of MMT before. They've been exposed to these ideas for the first time. How are they tending to react? Yeah, no, it's a great question. And I was really curious myself. I'm very unsure how folks were going to react because, yeah, in Woodstock, we had a lot of MMT folks there. I wasn't sure. So it's been really great to see it in a diversity. We've done a few festivals now and a diversity of audiences from coast to coast. And it's been really gratifying and really rewarding that, especially Bend, Oregon, other places where they've done a great job of just bringing in a general audience. I didn't go out and just get MMT folks to show up. So I was really, really happy to see that folks were getting it. They'd never heard of MMT before, and yet they came out saying, wow, I learned so much. And this makes a lot of sense. And I can't stop thinking about it. I hear people write me, and then I hear back, oh, they've been thinking about it ever since. And every time they watch the news, it changes how they think about what they're hearing on the news and about politics or about the national debt or anytime someone brings up money and spending and taxes. And so I think it's really breaking through for people. And they really want to be able to share it with their friends and family. So I'm really looking forward to that phase where everyone who's seen it can now go out and say, hey, go watch it here. Either buy a ticket to a theater. I do really highly recommend watching it with an audience. With these screenings, it's really fun. The audience really reacts and engages. And so I just think that experience is so valuable and really actually a fun film to watch in a theater with an audience. And then especially to have a chance for discussion afterwards, ask questions. Because the film, you hopefully will come away with a lot of questions. It's just like a foundation in the film for many more implications and directions you could go with this, especially if you're talking about global developing economies and implications for all these other, any other currency systems. There's a lot more to discuss, a lot more. But yeah, I've been really gratified seeing the audience reaction. I really recommend seeing it with a live audience. And then it's been excellent to hear people continue to think about it for a long time afterwards. So yes, I hope everyone can experience that soon. And we really do rely, I think on, we'll rely on that word of mouth of someone saying, hey, you really, they got to tell their friends about it. They got to tell their family about it. You know, oh, you're bringing up the national debt. And, you know, because that comes up in conversation every day. I think we're, we think no one really cares about economics or that just goes over everyone's head. But it's central to, I mean, economics is really just politics. And in a democracy, we do have to understand the basics to be able to vote and to be able to vote for our priorities and what we want to see in the world and in our country. So it's vital information, I think, for the general public to have and to be able to discuss and talk about. So yeah, I really hope we can spread by word of mouth that way. That'll be just essential. Yep. So you're bringing the film to Australia soon. I think in early March, you're doing a capital city tour of most of the capitals. But not Hobart yet, although I did hear a rumour it might be coming to Hobart or even the Huron Valley. I guess that's still to be determined. Sorry, I just lost my phone. We will put the Australian screening dates on our show notes, so everyone will know exactly the places and times. But you're coming as well, aren't you? You and I believe Stephanie Kelton's coming and you'll be doing like a Q&A with audiences. Yeah, definitely. So it's a huge opportunity. We're both getting all the way down there. I mean, I can't be more grateful to Stephen Hanna, Gabby Bonda and the Modern Money Lab and Torrance University. They're sponsoring this tour and doing so much great organising on the ground. I've got lots of volunteers and they're making sure this is going to be a success and really using the time wisely. I think with getting Stephanie down there, they really want to catalyse an impact and enter the mainstream political discourse. They're shift the debate. So yeah, we're organising a lot for this tour and it's a great opportunity to come out and see it in person with myself and Stephanie there, ask questions, we'll be able to discuss. I'm sure there'll be plenty of time for that and hopefully we'll be filling in with extra meetings and extra roundtable discussions and all that while we're there. So we are and we are hopeful to get to Tasmania perhaps. So definitely stay tuned. We'll be posting about that soon. And I think we're even doing a screening with the Sustainable Living Festival in Melbourne in February. So I'll be there early, just me without Stephanie. But yeah, so we're really, really trying to utilise this and the energy that exists in Australia. I'm so grateful for the organising and I think people have maybe been waiting for this moment and are really ready to help propel the story forward. So it's terrific to see. Yeah. And if people can't make those Australian screenings in late February, March, they'll be able to eventually see the film in a normal way through YouTube or other streaming services and all that. But they'll just have to wait a bit longer, won't they? Yeah, a bit longer. And we just have, we just signed distribution for the US and Canada, but we're still figuring out international distribution. So it will hopefully eventually get to YouTube and all of that, but we will definitely keep everyone posted. Best way to stay in touch would be signing up on our website for our email list, which is our website is findingmoneyfilm.com. So that's the best way to stay in touch and hear about as soon as we are able to offer it for digital rent. And however you rent movies or watch movies online, hopefully we'll be available there as soon as we can and we will let you know. Would you do the same treatment for, say, ecological economics, which is that you did for MMT? Because I think that's really desperately needed because MMT is not the whole of economics. It's only one part and we need to change really the whole of economics. That's very true. Yeah, there's so much more to cover. And honestly, I wanted to start with that, you know, start with the ecological economic story and kind of the growth paradigm. I mean, it's very similar kind of myth maybe that needs to be busted in a lot of, you know, what do we mean by economic growth or GDP growth when really there's this understanding of uneconomic growth and the fact that we could actually be doing better as a society if our GDP was not growing. And so that's a big, you know, a big myth to bust, you know, paradigm. So I think the reason I felt like I had to tell this story first, because it was kind of this foundational, this money piece, but I think ecological economics, economists themselves, and it's a great article that came out, Jason Hickel and some other co-authors who said, you know, how to pay for saving the world and really synthesizing ecological economics and MMT and saying, you know, this is kind of that missing piece that makes our theory more complete as well and shows us how we can use money as that organizing tool to have, you know, to successfully organize a de-growing economy or an economy that doesn't rely on GDP growth to have the tax revenue to pay for social public services. You know, it's kind of foundational. So, you know, without understanding the money piece, it's kind of hard to get to that next step of, OK, you know, what's the vision and how do we how do we operate that system? And so I felt like I had to tell this story first, but definitely, you know, that's the next story I'd love to tell. And it's too bad that this story took so long to figure out and to get out in the world. And it's quite an exhausting process. So hopefully I have it in me to do another one. We'll see. We'll see. I hope so. All right. I think we're going to have to leave it there. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us today. And we look forward to maybe seeing you in Australia very soon. Yes. Thank you so much for having me. And yes, I'd love to meet folks down there. Looking forward to it so much. Thanks. Well, since recording that podcast, it's been confirmed that Finding the Money will screen at the Palais Theatre at Franklin on the 27th of February at 6 p.m. Just go to the homepage of the Voices of Franklin website for more details on how to buy tickets. So until next time, this is your host, Steve Williams, signing off.