Come to my lightning talk in 45 minutes! **UBI and the end of Labor-Centric Economic Theory**

The Money View Reading Group is starting George Pantelopoulos's "Between Payments and Credit: An Introduction to the IOU Economy." Our first session is this coming Tuesday, March 10th, at 2pm EDT. ysi.ineteconomics.org/event/money-... Come join!

I recently joined Julian Vigo on her Savage Minds podcast to discuss UBI and jobs (and MMT). savageminds.substack.com/p/alex-howlett

New blog post from my colleague Derek Van Gorder! "Overemployment may already be the problem we should be worrying about—not joblessness." www.greshm.org/blog/unautom...

I wrote a guest blog post for the Feasta blog. "People need money. They don’t need to be exploited. And we certainly don’t need to pretend to exploit people as an excuse to hand them money." www.feasta.org/2026/01/30/b...

The Money View Reading Group is starting Joseph Schumpeter's "Treatise on Money." Our first session is next Monday, January 12th, at 2pm EST. ysi.ineteconomics.org/event/money-... Come join!

In my new working paper, "Keynesianism's Labor Problem," I argue that thinking of people as workers leads us to get economic theory wrong. This is a revised version of what I presented at the BIEN Congress in Brazil www.greshm.org/files/2025-1...

The Money View Reading Group is starting a new book! Our first session on Calomiris and Haber's "Fragile By Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit" (2014) is this coming Monday, November 17th, at 2pm EST. ysi.ineteconomics.org/event/money-... Come join!

The Money View Reading Group is starting a new book! Our first session on Giovanni Arrighi's "The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times" ([1994] 2010) is next Monday, October 20th, at 2pm EDT. ysi.ineteconomics.org/event/money-... Come join!

Latest piece on UBI here: www.greshm.org/blog/we-must... @alexhowlett.bsky.social @karlwiderquist.bsky.social @scottsantens.com @theubiguy.bsky.social

I have a new blog post on the difference between Guaranteed Income and Universal Basic Income. "Treating the symptoms of a broken system is a far different project from radically restructuring the system itself." www.greshm.org/blog/guarant...

Next Tuesday, August 12th, at 4 pm EDT, The Money View Reading Group is starting Kenneth Rogoff's new book, "Our Money, Your Problem: An Insider's View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance." Come join! ysi.ineteconomics.org/event/money-...

Does UBI solve a problem, or does it serve a function? UBI allows us to distribute money while allocating labor more efficiently. "The more efficiently we can exploit people, the less we have to exploit them."

If you're serious about environmental impact, then you should be serious about UBI. "Have we unwittingly been overemploying ourselves and overworking our economy, incurring costs to markets and our environment, yet receiving fewer benefits in return?" www.greshm.org/blog/ubi-and...

"Everyone has their own individual balance of payments: the time pattern of locked-in cash flows and cash commitments. When money is tighter in the market as a whole, those with payments deficits drive up the money rate of interest by bidding for funds."

The Money View Reading Group is starting a new book! Our first session on Fernand Braudel's "The Wheels of Commerce" (1982) is this coming Tuesday, May 6th at 4pm EDT. ysi.ineteconomics.org/event/money-... Come join!

And this piece I co-authored with my "roommate" appears in it rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/an-equa... @karlwiderquist.bsky.social @alexhowlett.bsky.social @scottsantens.com @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social @amycastro.bsky.social

"Individual countries want to believe that they can control their own monetary systems, but they don't have their own monetary systems. There is one system: a global system."

"As long as cash commitments are easy to meet, people will continue entering into new cash commitments. The web will grow more tangled. The dominos will get closer together. This continues right up to the point of financial crisis."

My colleague Derek Van Gorder has written a new working paper explaining the idea of Calibrated Basic Income. There's a level of UBI that maximally helps the economy serve the people. Let's find it. www.greshm.org/files/2025-0...

"Money, in its ideal platonic form, is a credit claim. Commodity monies such as gold are merely an approximation of that ideal."

The Money View Reading Group is starting a new book! Our first session on "The Empire of Value" by André Orléan (2014) is Tuesday, March 25th at 4pm EDT. ysi.ineteconomics.org/event/money-... Come join!

"The emergence of banking is the emergence of hierarchy."

"Centralization is natural. Money and banking connect everything. Labeling the economy as distinct public and private sectors doesn't change that. Beneath the labels, the monetary system is all one thing."

Phil Jackson's Talk from BIEN Congress 2024: Why Basic Income Is Cooler Than You Think "If automation is hurting people, then that has to mean that there is something wrong with the economy itself."

Banks are in the business of "monetizing" debt.

It takes two (at least) to transact. If we want to wrap our heads around money and banking, we need to learn how to think in terms of transactions.

New Post! The four payment types are the fundamental building blocks for understanding all balance sheet operations.

Nobody should be entitled to a job or a wage. Not even physicists.

"Prices come from markets made by market-makers providing liquidity. And liquidity lets people meet their payment commitments to satisfy their survival constraint."

New post! We can compensate for a payments deficit by dishoarding money (monetary liquidity), borrowing (funding liquidity), or liquidating assets (market liquidity).

New post! Perry Mehrling's money view perceives assets and liabilities as time patterns of future cash flows and commitments. We lose this information when we try to calculate the net worth of a balance sheet or aggregate balance sheets into sectors. survivalconstraint.substack.com/p/balancing-...

I've started a new Substack to supplement Perry Mehrling's "money view" framework and his 2012 Economics of Money and Banking lectures. Check out the first post!

INET's Young Scholars Initiative is organizing the 5th annual online Money View Symposium from February 14th to 16th. If you'd like to present, please submit an abstract by January 12th! ysi.ineteconomics.org/event/money-...

On Saturday, I had the privilege of exchanging ideas about Universal Basic Income with Steve Keen and friends, fellow travelers who have different visions of how to improve humanity's prospects. @scottsantens.com @michaelalewis10.bsky.social @karlwiderquist.bsky.social @theubiguy.bsky.social

Hey everyone! I'll be discussing Universal Basic Income on Steve Keen's streaming show on Saturday at 12pm EST. Tune in and ask questions!

Starting tomorrow (Nov 12th) at 4pm EST, the Money View Reading Group will be discussing "A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States 1961–2021" by Alan Blinder (2022). ysi.ineteconomics.org/event/money-... Come join!

Reducing the incentive to work is not the same thing as reducing productivity. If people are over-incentivized to work, then reducing the work incentive will increase productivity.

It's not a radical idea to expect jobs to pay enough to cover rent and other basic expenses. A radical idea would be to realize that this expectation doesn't make sense.

The dysfunction in our money distribution system stems from our expectation that people should "earn" a living. It causes us to artificially stimulate both labor supply and labor demand.

It's normal not to want to do the kind of work that we have to pay people to do. That's why we have to pay for it in the first place.

Universal Basic Income is compatible with neoliberalism in the sense that it helps the market better serve the people and society. If you're a neoliberal trying to use UBI as a Trojan Horse to dismantle the welfare state, you're using it wrong.

Starting on October 1st at 4pm EDT, the Money View Reading Group will be discussing "Birth of a Market: The U.S. Treasury Securities Market from the Great War to the Great Depression" by Kenneth Garbade (2012). ysi.ineteconomics.org/event/money-... Come join!

Nobody should be entitled to a job, let alone any particular wage.

Universal Basic Income doesn't mean that workers are paying non-workers to be lazy. It means that the government is paying everyone instead of forcing people to work unproductive jobs.

Instead of the Fed lowering interest rates today, we could have had a Universal Basic Income.

We all depend on the government for money distribution. But instead of just handing people money, the government stimulates the financial sector to generate wages for people. Those wages and the jobs that pay them are not necessary for efficient labor allocation.

I wonder if the folks who suggest that people get jobs instead of Universal Basic Income understand that they're advocating using fake jobs as an excuse to hand people money.

People who oppose Universal Basic Income usually fail to propose an alternative.

Forcing people to spend their time unproductively to "earn" their money is more wasteful than paying all people unconditionally, some of whom might happen to choose to spend their time unproductively.