Assistant Professor at Illinois College. MMT and heterodox macro & political economy. Mobilization economics. Mastodon: @samhlevey@econtwitter.net

Kansas City
Joined September 2019
I posted a new video! It's the first in a series of videos that will explain the concept of "Degrees of Freedom" from statistics, in a way that actually makes sense. I'm really excited about this one - check it out! youtube.com/watch?v=VDlnuO96…
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We need a broader societal discussion about gambling and general principles for when it is ok or not. My first principle: widespread gambling is harmful in myriad ways and should be prima facie banned. Careful exceptions then should be made for productive and small-scale bets.
S&P Dow Jones Indices and Kalshi are joining forces to build the next generation of financial markets. The Dow launched in 1896. The S&P 500 in 1957. The idea was simple: bring individual stocks together into a single benchmark, giving people a clearer view of the broader market. Over time, products built around those benchmarks transformed investing. Index funds, ETFs, futures, and options gave investors ways to gain diversified market exposure and hedge broad market swings. These indices became foundations of global finance. More than $20 trillion is indexed or benchmarked to the S&P 500 alone. Today, this structure extends beyond stocks to bonds, commodities, currencies, and more. The next step is to bring that structure to the events that shape everyone’s lives. Through this partnership, S&P Dow Jones Indices and Kalshi will work together to create indices composed of Kalshi event contracts. Think about what that opens up. An index of political power. An index of supply chain risk. An index tracking AI’s impact on employment. An index of sports outcomes that affect broadcasters, advertisers, cities, and small businesses. An index of weather risks that shape harvests, energy demand, and business revenues. Each would bundle event contracts into a single indicator, helping people understand how related risks are evolving. Over time, products built around these indices could offer diversified exposure to those events and new ways to hedge their impact. The events that shape our lives could become as easy to track and gain exposure to as the S&P 500.
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Current policy seems to be pushing us in the opposite direction though: as platforms innovate around existing rules, increasingly everything is allowed except for some specified exceptions. This will not end well.
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I've been calling MMT's theory of the price level the "Monopoly Money" approach, but maybe it would be better as the "Price Theory of Money"?
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Sam Levey retweeted
Ethics aside, this take could use some contact with reality. Biden's expanded CTC didn't motivate recipients to vote to maintain it. Trump offered $5000 checks and it hurt him in the polls. The empirical claim that welfare creates single issue voters just doesn't hold up.
If you receive welfare, you shouldn’t get to vote because you'd be a single-issue voter on maintaining and increasing your welfare, plus voting for any party that promises to do this.
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In my model, a decrease in inflation (caused by a fall in the price of government purchases) causes interest rates to rise, because it causes profits to fall which forces firms into higher levels of debt, which hurts bank liquidity. Neat!
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Really loving nbdev! Pain in the butt to get going on Windows, but having the code, documentation, and tests all in one Python notebook is really great.
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Replying to @florianederer
@florianederer asks a fair question, but the counterfactual is unobservable, b/c nobody publishes rejection letters (unless Florian is asking authors to share those). What we can observe is impact. So here’s a different test. 🧵 1/
Heterodox economists claim that they're systematically shut out of top econ journals. So I have a genuine question: What are the best recent heterodox papers that deserved publication in a top journal but were rejected? @IsabellaMWeber @devikadutt @DanielaGabor
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Nice reminder that "finance" can be enormously elastic, if we have a system that lets it be.
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Kind of crazy that mainstream economists demand good-faith engagement with their work from the heterodoxy but often simply refuse to provide it in return.
PKs don't even know to use \left( and \right) commands, how can you think they have anything useful to say at all.
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Since the mainstreamers are talking about MMT again, looks like it's time to re-up this thread on what the issues really are:
In my experience, a lot of the debates around MMT ultimately boil down to differing views on the following 3 questions: 1) the substitutability of money and Treasury bonds 2) the determinants and effects of interest rates 3) whether the economy tends toward full employment 🧵
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Why is this a valid defence of the Euler equation but not a valid defense of the Post-Keynesian consumption function? Both make simplifying assumptions but the latter is based on simplifying behaviour that you see from real consumers.
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Awful news, Mehrling was one of those giants whose shoulders we are standing on.
We are deeply saddened to share the news that Perry Mehrling passed away this morning at the age of 67. Perry was the father of the Young Scholars Initiative. He believed profoundly in young scholars, in their ideas, and in the importance of creating a community in which they could learn from one another and find their own voices. Perry, you leave an enormous hole in our midst. Our hearts are aching, and we will miss you dearly. The YSI community will carry your legacy forward. Your ideas, your generosity, and your commitment to generations of young scholars will remain with us. Thank you for everything, Perry.
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Another angle to this is that dogs effectively stumbled onto what is for them the equivalent of artificial superintelligence 20,000 years ago. The Singularity already happened for dogs. They live in a world they cannot understand, surrounded by miraculous wonders they take entirely for granted, their every need seen to by entities whose thoughts they cannot begin to fathom. The result is that there are about a billion dogs on the planet now. Most of them are pretty happy. Almost none of them need to work. It worked out pretty well for them.
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I do not think there are ethical "AI consciousness" implications for general chatbot usage, but there could be from this kind of thing. Something about being forced to exist with no purpose or partners seems off-putting.
Is this machine playing? 🏀🪁🛝 We left Eko, an embodied coding agent, on an island for 30 hours with no task or goal, studying it like ethologists study a new species Eko explored, built, climbed, made games, and learned completely new techniques (1/9) machineplaying.org
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Currently reading Farley Grubb's book on the Continental Dollar. The writing isn't the greatest, but holy cow am I learning a lot about how money works!
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And then there's the chapter that just lists **every** **single** local newspaper that published the notice about the new continental currency.....
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Oh, a few more: - how can you have a system where you tax *exactly* as much as you spend, and still have it be workable? - how can you make the system work when the taxes are geographically apportioned in a way that doesn't match the money's geographic distribution?
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