Friday, August 17, 2012

Bill Mitchell — The labour market is not like the market for bananas

I am now using Friday’s blog space to provide draft versions of the Modern Monetary Theory textbook that I am writing with my colleague and friend Randy Wray. We expect to complete the text by the end of this year. Comments are always welcome. Remember this is a textbook aimed at undergraduate students and so the writing will be different from my usual blog free-for-all. Note also that the text I post is just the work I am doing by way of the first draft so the material posted will not represent the complete text. Further it will change once the two of us have edited it.
Chapter 10 is about the Labour Market.
Bill Mitchell — billy blog
The labour market is not like the market for bananas
Bill Mitchell

7 comments:

Bob Roddis said...

Your entire economic "vision" depends upon this entirely bogus assertion. The labor market is just like the market for bananas. And it's also just like the market for internet dating.

PeterP said...

Bob,
I assume you couldn't follow the logic in Mitchell's article? You just state your religious belief? Because your assertion is totally baseless.

Tom Hickey said...

This is why Mitchell and Wray decided to include this chapter. Human beings are not commodities other than in the view of numbskulls and exploiters.

Anonymous said...

Your entire economic "vision" depends upon this entirely bogus assertion. The labor market is just like the market for bananas. And it's also just like the market for internet dating.

Oh is that so, Bob?

I can go down to the grocery store and buy some bananas for a couple bucks.

How much for your wife, Bob?

jrbarch said...

... numbskulls, exploiters and predators!

Septeus7 said...

I'm wondering if Bill and other MMTer have considered David Ellerman's arguments about labor and capital ownership conflicts as a result of the confusion between contract rights versus property rights in the management of the firm rather than a Marxian "fundamentally “antagonistic” or adversarial" relationship between employers and workers?

The main argument is the because a legal holdover from the land property ownership equaling legal sovereignty over the native population in the feudal system has carried over to the firm management belonging to the Capitalist has creating the so-called worker vs. capitalist class conflict but it doesn't have to exist as a economic necessity from private capital ownership contra Marx ( see http://www.abolishhumanrentals.org/human-rentals/the-fundamental-myth/).

I'm thinking a lot of Ellerman's work is quite radical and Tom being a beyond-communist left might find David Ellerman's blog interesting (http://www.blog.ellerman.org/).

I find it amazing how much I agree with Tom even though I consider myself post-conservative social conservative as opposed to the rightwing reactionary crazies calling myself republican, libertarians, Teabaggers, etc...




Tom Hickey said...

Thanks for the suggestion, Septeus7. I've added Ellerman's blog to my feed.