Accounting Identities or Accounting Analogies?

by Will Beaman

Most people’s first exposure to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) comes with a gentle promise: It is just accounting. The government’s deficit is the non-government sector’s surplus, by simple double-entry logic. Sectoral balances show it clearly—your fear of public debt is a confusion. Every liability is someone else’s asset. The numbers must sum to zero.

This framing has done enormous work. It has disarmed austerians, reassured the cautious, and made deficits sound boring in the best possible way. If money is just a set of balancing books, then maybe we can stop moralizing it. Maybe we can finally get to the real work of provisioning public life.

But even within MMT, the picture is more complicated than is suggested by the T-account’s clean offsetting lines. One of MMT’s most striking ideas—the proposal for a job guarantee—quietly shows why. At first glance, the job guarantee seems to illustrate a familiar differentiation between obligations and rights: the public commits to spend, creating jobs, while people get to work. Obligations and rights line up, tidily offset on the ledger. Each person’s duty is matched by someone else’s claim. It is a vision of economic life built from clear, reciprocally balanced units. It implies a methodological commitment to difference, where every distinct role is defined precisely by not being its counterpart.

Look a little closer, however, and the job guarantee reveals something more interesting. A right to a job is not simply the opposite of a duty. It mixes together rights and duties. After all, a job in such a program is both a right to work and a duty to fulfill one’s role in that job. The job guarantee thus entangles provision, participation, maintenance, and shared decisions about what kinds of work matter. Who is supporting whom? Who is being guaranteed by whom? It is hard to say, because these functions are detailed and diverse, constantly overlapping and rebalancing. 

The point is not to collapse differences into sameness, or to stage every difference as a kind of isolated disjunction. It is that these differences lean on each other, line up in ways that let us keep building a shared life. We at Money on the Left call this an analogical metaphysics because it describes how unlike contributions and claims can still coordinate, not by forcing them into sameness or opposition, but by letting them participate together in shaping what we owe and receive.

Seen through the prism of analogy, the job guarantee is more than a clever accounting offset. It helps us glimpse how the very categories of rights and obligations stand neither in one place nor wholly still. They are not parceled out among atomized people and perfectly counterweighted. They are always being provisioned and adjusted through systems that rely on many roles at once—linked by analogy, not by strict equivalence or pure contrast.

To recognize the full social power of sectoral balances, we must move beyond seeing them as either reassuring identities or sobering non-identities, and instead approach them as sites of relational coordination. The theory of sectoral balance works by showing that government deficits and private surpluses are equal and opposite. But then, almost inevitably, comes the clarification: yes, they are numerically identical, but experientially and socially they are not the same. Owing is different from being owed. Holding a government bond is not the same as carrying the tax obligations that ultimately sustain it.

This move—from identity to non-identity—has been crucial for demystifying fear around public debt. It has helped people see that when the government spends, it simultaneously creates private savings. That the line from liabilities to assets does not mark a fall from grace, it is just how collective economic life is recorded.

And yet, even this picture can be more limiting than we realize. It rests on the idea that there are discrete obligations and discrete entitlements, held by discrete people, neatly offsetting each other in the social ledger. You can see this logic everywhere, even in critical traditions. Legal realists, for example, did vital work by showing that rights imply obligations—that private property is not really a relationship between you and an object, but between you and everyone else with respect to that object. It is a crucial insight that exposes how social these arrangements always are. But it often still pictures them as static, reciprocal claims: your right is another person’s duty, precisely counterbalanced. It reveals the contingency of property or contract, yet does not quite unsettle the deeper frame of equal-but-opposite units distributed among atomized individuals.

This is broadly characteristic of the methodological commitment to difference that is found across myriad critical traditions from the humanities to legal theory. It proceeds from an image of agency as refusal and non-identity—as a break or departure from whatever has tried to define us. By contrast, Money on the Left’s analogical metaphysics begins from subtly different premises. It sees agency not primarily as an act of refusal, but as a form of non-identical participation: a way of entering into shared systems and relations that never collapse our differences, yet still provision us together.

So maybe what we are seeing here is not a shift from identity to non-identity, but something else entirely—a deeper logic of analogy. An identity tries to equate things, to say they are the same in all the ways that matter. A statement of non-identity unquestioningly insists they are not the same, often leaving them standing apart. But an analogy allows different varieties of contribution, need, and entitlement to resonate with one another—to lean in, adjust, and coordinate without collapsing into sameness. It is a way of linking relationships that are not reducible to a single measure, yet are not altogether unrelated either. Different varieties of participation can still echo across shared infrastructures, sustaining life together even when they do not match or mirror each other exactly.

Yet an analogical view of sectoral balances does not dissolve difference into uniformity or reduce participation to equivalence. A balance sheet, seen this way, does not flatten everything into sameness. It becomes a tool for tracking how these diverse obligations and promises continue to rely on one another, sometimes matching, often overlapping awkwardly, always requiring ongoing attention. At its best, this is what MMT illuminates: that ledgers stage analogies rather than identities. They do not capture a pure equivalence that might later turn out to be false, as in so many liberal or Marxist accounts of money as a failed or mystified sameness. Instead, they set up relationships that were never supposed to be identical — relationships that hold together by analogy, linking what is unlike in ways that still let it provision us.

This matters for how we think about politics across global, national and local registers. Take Zohran Mamdani’s broad coalition in Astoria, which I have written about elsewhere. Mamdani did not win by treating the city as a flat service provider handing out identical benefits. It brought together renters, workers, immigrants, and small business owners, each helping sustain the city in ways that were detailed and diverse without being exactly the same. By that same logic, we could also push back on the common view of free buses as a simple consumer giveaway that drains the city budget. Instead, we might see them as a living asset: building capacities and relationships that far exceed what shows up on a fiscal spreadsheet.

It is not hard to imagine a small pilot in New York that plays this out more explicitly—say, a modest community service program that offers credits for helping at local cleanups, libraries, or tenant meetings. Those credits could be quietly recorded across the ledgers of multiple public benefit corporations that already keep the city going: the MTA, NYCHA, HDC, even the water authority. Each could treat these credits not only as costs or subsidies, but also as partial assets that help sustain their own infrastructures—a way of literally accounting for how participation builds collective capacity. It is one loose idea for how we might use the ledgers we already have, not only to tally expenses, but to reflect all the different ways we help build and maintain the city together.

Which might be the deeper promise hiding inside MMT all along. It is not merely that we can afford more spending, or that debts do not matter the way we were taught. MMT reveals that our lives are already held together by a web of overlapping credits and obligations, none of them exactly the same, all of them linked by analogy. Accounting can still show us how to balance, but only if we let it reveal what we are balancing for: the chance to provision a world that holds us, differently and together.