Month: October 2015
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Thinking About “Assets” and Ownership
My gentle readers will know that I often struggle with economic terminology, both because I find usages are so vague, various, and poorly defined, and because I’m trying to understand fundamental terms’ fundamental meanings. Today I’d like to home in on one of the most fundamental — “assets” — and something even more fundamental that underpins…
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Thinking about Value, and the National Accounts
The remarkable discussion on “national wealth” and the national accounts that is running over at Interfluidity (373 comments and counting…) in response to my last post prompts me to recount an anecdote that I think is germane. I took exactly one accounting class in my life, at the NYU MBA school — essentially Accounting for…
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Where MMT Gets Its Accounting Wrong — And Right
Modern Monetary Theory has been revolutionary in economics, and its influence is — beneficially — ever-more pervasive. It has opened the eyes of a generation to a clear-eyed, accounting-based methodology that trumps dimensionless theory, and has brought a deep, nuts-and-bolts understanding of money, debt, and financial institutions to a discipline where that understanding has been inexcusably…