In this episode, we speak with Walt McRee (President) and Peter Winslow (Vice President) of the Public Banking Institute (PBI) about their past and ongoing advocacy for public banking. Founded in 2011 by author Ellen Brown and a core collective of advocates, PBI aims to break the monopoly of Wall Street’s private banking system by establishing a nationwide network of publicly owned, democratically accountable banks. Through this work, PBI seeks to foster a wide-spread monetary and banking system that operates explicitly in the public interest, treating credit as a vital public utility rather than a vehicle for private extraction. 

If private mega-banks are legally bound to maximize short-term returns for external shareholders, McRee and Winslow explain, then public banks operate under a legal mandate to generate shared prosperity, measuring fiscal success in terms of community participation, well-being, and resilience. During our conversation, we discuss the history of the PBI, the myriad projects that public banks can finance, diverse models for establishing public banks, and the organization’s efforts to serve as a catalyst for the growing public banking movement across the United States. 

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

Billy Saas

Walt McRee and Peter Winslow. Welcome to Money on the Left.

Walt McRee

Thank you.

Peter Winslow

Thank you.

Billy Saas

It’s great to have you. We’ll start, as we normally do, by asking you to say just a little bit about yourselves and how you came to the Public Banking Institute, which is going to be a centerpiece of our conversation today. Let’s go ahead and start with you, Peter.

Peter Winslow

Oh. Thank you. My background is in business and finance. I received a BA in economics at the University of Pennsylvania State, stayed to get an MBA in finance from the Wharton Graduate School. I was a CPA and practiced in New York for many years.

I’m a Deloitte alum. I’ve had a varied career doing a variety of things. I was doing a lot of work in sustainable economic development, especially economic development within the inner city and depressed sections of the community. That’s how I got invited into public banking about ten or more years ago. I’ve been working at it in Philadelphia and nationally ever since.

Scott Ferguson

Are there a lot of folks who are Deloitte alums who are interested in public banking?

Peter Winslow

That’s a really interesting question.

Scott Ferguson

Well, I’m glad I asked.

00;02;46;18 – 00;03;19;19

Peter Winslow

You know, I haven’t asked. I probably should, but there may be. Accountants approach things in a very meticulous way, but conceptually, and have very definite ideas about money and about how money is used and recorded and valuation and risk and so forth. So it’s banking adjacent.

Some of the work I did was involved with securities firms and that was certainly interesting. But in terms of my colleagues, I don’t know. I’m going to my reunion, when we leave here. I’ll ask some of the folks from my class what their opinions are about public banking and see if I can enlist them.

Scott Ferguson

Let us know.

Walt McRee

Yeah. Well, I guess that leaves me. Yeah. I do not have a Deloitte background. Peter brings up that part of our expertise offerings. My background was actually in media. I started in broadcast media, winding up in Philadelphia in major markets, doing radio broadcast and media consulting, voiceover work out of Manhattan. At the same time, then getting involved initially with the public interest activist issues. I started from here in the anti-war movement which was a long time ago, but seems to be ever present. From that, working into discovering something that was powerful, which was working with Bucky Fuller in Philadelphia, when he launched a thing called the Hunger Project. The Hunger Project was a very simple opportunity for people to participate in an issue that was much bigger than them, world hunger. And to do what they want, and to organize around doing new things to end world hunger with a new understanding about why hunger could be ended.

So Bucky said, “there’s no reason why people starve as a public policy. There’s plenty of food, etc., etc.” I mention that because in the public banking application, we were suggesting something that and you all have been suggesting something that hasn’t and doesn’t exist. That is, we are demythologizing banking. We’re demythologizing money. We’re really looking at a new possibility.

So my work there, where I started a lot of national initiatives around media and so forth, was one part of my background. Along the way, I’ve also been a real estate entrepreneur and developer. I’ve been involved in preserving the arts. Another activist campaign was with an environmental fight along the banks of the Delaware River, which involved taking over the government as a citizen action, involving Abbie Hoffman, that’s the name you remember. It was a very exciting, dynamic experience of local people coming from all kinds of a cross-section of ideological, political, financial, wherewithal to come in to stand together around something that they didn’t want, which in that instance was a pumping project along the Delaware River.

Interesting, I think I mentioned before, that being in this Delaware River valley, where Washington crossed the river surprised the Hessians and the English flipped the whole paradigm of possibility. That’s kind of the context in which I have juiced a lot of my involvement here, which has been about 15 years. I started with the Public Banking Institute back when it started.

I was one of the original participating board members and started a media committee, then got on the board and 15 years later, here I am chairing as president, still working at it. Again, to try to qualify my banking bonafides, through all of my University of hard knocks, Harvard would have been cheaper than what I’ve learned. But I’ve learned at the feet of real experts, academics, bankers, banking people, policy people. I’ve been very fortunate to be able to develop my education that way with the likes of you guys.

Peter Winslow

Well, do you want to talk about the origins of the Public Banking Institute and the work with Ellen Brown?

Walt McRee

Sure. That’s a good one, because if you remember, 2008, when the banks collapsed the global economy, financial economist, Ellen Brown, who’s a noted bestselling author who wrote Web of Debt, circulated a new understand, a story and a research piece, an exposé about how our money is organized and how banking is organized and why this failure happened, and the kind of trap, the monetary trap that we find ourselves in in this current, debt driven, financial arrangement.

So, Ellen’s book got to be very successful, and then Occupy Wall Street occurred in 2011, during which time people suddenly discovered that they were in a category, in a cohort that they didn’t know. That is that we are the 99%. Well we didn’t know we didn’t have the money that’s out there. People knew that they were struggling and so forth, but that was a declaration or a distinction that really propelled the public banking movement. It started in California, but it rapidly got buy-in in Philadelphia, becoming one of the core areas in which I helped to start that with Mike Krauss, back in 2011 and 12.

The Public Banking Institute then has been an educational source, an organizing source, a place where resources and collaboration converge. Also, focusing on looking at how the matrix of money management is not in our hands. To realize how the people have abrogated the most powerful tool, one of the most powerful tools they have beside their goodwill and brotherhood and largesse: money, basically.

That’s what the Public Banking Institute is up to now. I will just say one more thing. We’ve come a long way in our work. For the first ten years, what was required was explaining to people how banking works and what we had found along the way was that a lot of legislators and bankers seem to not know the reality that, for example, that banks create our money when they make loans.

Well, that was a huge breakthrough and also, of course, poo-pooed by the institutionalists who think that, “I don’t know, it’s all, you know, something else.” So, that sort of demythologizing education has been part of this ten years. We worked in markets around the country, probably 30 different markets at least, often running into the same sort of obstacles and complexities that are put there by politicians and the banking associations, the ignorance of legislators about banking and their fear of doing anything new.

So we’ve run to a point now where we realize what we can’t easily do, and that is to create these banks outright because the resistance is too strong, for the most part, but we are finding pockets of support and we are finding very large arteries of public support, which we think is going to put this opportunity into a different plane in the very near future, in part driven by the realities of the day that we live in now.

Peter Winslow

You mentioned Buckminster Fuller and one of the phenomena that Buckminster Fuller identified and worked on was ephemeralization. Money is an extremely ephemeral phenomenon in our society that people live with and don’t really understand particularly well. Sometimes ephemeralization is described as the process of doing more and more with less and less until eventually you’re doing everything with nothing.

With the AI future, maybe we’re headed in that direction, but money is inherently an already ephemeral substance in our society that runs through it as information transfer and is interesting to study from that perspective. The banking system performs an alchemy that is really very interesting and does not have to be and has not been in the past the way it is now. It does not have to be that way in the future. We’re looking for a more robust future, and one that’s more equitable.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah. So maybe piggybacking off of that. I know we’ve already started this work, but give us the ground level pitch, why public banking? You know, don’t we have enough banks to finance what society needs? Why more banks and why public banks? What do public banks bring to the picture and why are you two so into this thing?

Walt McRee

Well, the answer to “oh, don’t we have enough banks?” is, of course we do. But that would be the answer of the organized banking industry of private banks and because we deal with private banks in the US, except for one, that is a corporate private industry driven by profit, and therefore it has no universal obligation to serve.

It is not considered a utility other than the fact that people need money to live. But there’s no structural organizational commitment obligation for them to operate that way. When we would explain this, first of all, “what is a public bank?” people think it’s traded on the market.

It’s not that. It’s anything that is owned by the city, county or state, any governmental agency, that would have the people’s money in hand, would be capable of creating a bank, qualified with the other parameters, of course. The idea is to keep our money at home, to invest in ourselves and our message is “look, every time you send in tax dollars to your city, county, state, or whatever fees and so forth, they take that money and they send it essentially to Wall Street.”

It leaves town and that asset leaves the community, a local economy. What public banks do is say, “well, no, leave that in our own bank so that we can do what the private banks would otherwise do with it.” They’ll speculate and invest in all kinds of things we may very well not want them to invest in when in the interest of making a profit.

Whereas if you keep our money at home, we can keep that money and we do the very same thing, but we can invest in our own stuff; our schools, our infrastructure, our affordable housing, small businesses, etc., where we need the money. That’s the transformative opportunity and it is a comprehensively transformative opportunity that we’re talking about here.

I think that at this moment of where we’re seeing the oligarchy and those forces solidifying and controlling and extracting, it’s getting very serious, local economies are failing. So this message is resonating in ways that it hasn’t so much in the past. 

Scott Ferguson

There’s at least two dimensions here about keeping money at home. On the one hand, there’s the question of how you are mediating extant claims? How they are, quote unquote, “traveling through the system or the so-called plumbing.” But then there’s also the other dimension, which I think is even more mind blowing for people, which is the fact that banks create money.

This is not just about appropriating a finite amount of funds, and I have to put scare quotes around all these terms, that are “circulating in a system.” Correct me if I’m wrong, it’s fundamentally about reclaiming the capacity to generate money for the public and for public purposes.

Walt McRee

Yes.

Peter Winslow

Yeah. There’s been a failure of imagination, to a large extent, in terms of how people conceive of things, conceive of money and conceive of banking. The system is not broken. It works very well for the banks that are too big to fail. You know, periodically, there’s a financial crisis and they get bailed out and life goes on and they continue doing what they’ve been doing. It works very well for the people who are involved in that particular line of business of banking and financing. Large corporations and so forth don’t have any problem obtaining the money that they need for the projects that they want. We don’t have problems finding money to fight wars and a lot of things that politicians decide are worthwhile, but there is not enough money available to serve the public, the public interest.

That’s what public banks are for, public interest that is not profit for private interests. There is not enough availability of money, there’s not fair access to credit for many people in our society, in the community. There is a need for a non-extractive form of financial ecosystem.

One that serves the needs of the people, as opposed to private profit just piling money up, like Midas in his vault. That’s what public banking is all about. It’s really an alternative to the extractive model of the economy, to one that is much more dedicated to where the real needs are for housing, for vibrant local businesses, for the development of cooperatives and so forth.

That’s what public banking serves and it is not intended to replace the existing system. It’s intended to, perhaps, provide an alternative and a corrective, maybe serve as a break or trim tab that does some adjustment to the overall economy. But fundamentally, because of its local focus, it is really determined to serve the needs of the people and the places where those people live and have their local financial ecosystem operating.

Walt McRee

I’d like to just correct the metaphor that you gave Peter. I don’t think Midas had the vault. I think you’re thinking of Scrooge McDuck, just to be correct here. On the one thing, are there enough banks? What we found, when we, for example, were involved in the New Jersey Public Bank Implementation Board  study of where the gaps are. The bankers in the state said, “oh, we’re doing a great job. We make community contributions and little leagues and other things and so forth.” As Peter points out, there are enormous sectors of need that are not handled by private banks. The reason is there’s no money or there’s too much risk. What public banks do in reality, at least when we look at the North Dakota model, we see that public private banks succeed like nowhere else in the country because they have a public bank partner.

The rest of the banks around the country are really at that increased risk to take on social emissions and so they’re really constrained, in that way. Whereas public banks really have it as their purpose to extend credit, and that’s an enormous difference.

Peter Winslow

Banks, small banks, local banks proliferated after the Civil War and grew to be the way in which most people did their banking. But, starting in the 60s, there has been a contraction of banks and consolidation has taken place. Now, it’s a healthy environment if you have new banks being created, going to a certain size and needing to have a greater reach, and an exit strategy for those banks is to be acquired by a larger bank and to have a consolidation and so forth. That’s not really functioning very well at this time. The small banks are really very local, and they are not as apt to be properties that the larger banks are requiring. From an historic standpoint, we have fewer local banks and fewer banks overall and one of the things that a public bank can do is nurture the local financial ecosystem and help all of those banks grow and be more robust.

Walt McRee

As an example of the success of that, in Germany, where the Sparkassen, which is a community owned banks, they have thousands of them, but it is that infrastructure, the fabric, the texture of that community-based financing engines that stabilize those economies, and public banks have been shown to do that across the world.

That’s just one of the things they do is they can keep the community resources in place and keep them moving. So we want that here. I think we had about 15,000 private banks in 1980. Now we’ve got 4100. So we’ve lost a substantial number of privately owned community banks.

Peter Winslow

About a quarter of the total assets of the world are held in public banks. The United States is really an outlier in that respect. We only have one public bank in the United States. That is the kind of a bank that we would regard as the model and that’s the Bank of North Dakota.

There are some other examples that are particular anomalies, but the one that really makes the most sense to look at as a model is the Bank of North Dakota.

Billy Saas

Could we talk a little bit about the Bank of North Dakota? How did that bank get started? And if we’re talking about it as the model, what are its key features that other aspiring publics should try to replicate?

Walt McRee

Well, I’d like to just step in with making a reference to my own history. The farmers in North Dakota in 1915, I think it was, were being put out by the banks. The Minneapolis banks, the granaries and the railroads were all conspiring, if you will, to set prices that made the idea of farming in North Dakota even less desirable and certainly less profitable.

The citizens said, “hey, we’re not stupid here.” They created a new political arm called the nonpartisan league, a very fitting sort of a moniker for where we should find ourselves these days, because the common need of the citizens there was clear. They needed to have more economic stability and control on what was happening to their money and their assets.

They wind up taking over the government, which is what we did in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with this water fight. It was just hugely invigorating to find your neighbors out in the streets. Well, in North Dakota, the Nonpartisan League started a group called the Six Bucks Suckers.

Six bucks was their annual fee to become a part of this movement. That was enough money to drive this thing for a couple of years. Then they took over the legislature in 1919. The first thing they did was to create a state granary. That granary was the largest in the country, and it’s still operating, it belongs to the state of North Dakota.

The next thing they did was to create the state bank. That really helped to firm up things. 107 years later, that bank has made North Dakota the most stable state economy. It is also a bank that is the most profitable of any bank in the United States, profitable in terms of a return on equity.

No scandals along the way. One of the beautiful things about having your own bank, and there are many, but the ability to respond to crises was demonstrated in numerous instances in North Dakota. The Grand Forks fire and flood that wiped out Grand Forks, North Dakota and Grand Forks, Minnesota illustrated how important it was for a local bank to be in place, for the public bank to be in place, because that fire and flood wiped out both towns and an enormous amount of damage.

The North Dakota bank was there the next day and said, “look, let’s clean this stuff up. Don’t worry about the money. We’re going to do what you need for machinery and stuff. We’ll handle the money later.” As a result, North Dakota’s Grand Forks recovered within only a 3% loss of population during an extended period of disaster. Across the same river at the same spot in Minnesota they had to go to Wall Street. They had to go to Minneapolis and borrow the money to recover. They lost almost 20% of their population. Now that’s a huge equity loss, huge asset loss, realized because they didn’t have the means to finance themselves. Well, there were other instances that the bank has stepped in like that.

In the 30s, when the crops were drying up, farms were being reclaimed by the banks, the bank came in and said, “listen, guys, don’t go anywhere near the foreclosures. Just stay put. We will buy your farm. You stay there, the weather will change. You know, things will come back. And when the things do come back, we’ll sell your place back to you with the mortgage that you can afford.” I mean, that kind of flexibility and sort of utility is so logical. It’s like a family mentality, you know? “Hey, we’re all in this together, and we’ve got this money, and you can use it and we’ll save it for you. We’ll save your hide.”

That’s a beautiful thing about one of the transformative aspects about having a community owned public bank.

Peter Winslow

Yeah. The public bank can respond to disasters and crises much faster than other resources do. For example, during the Covid pandemic, the state of North Dakota had put in place a PPE program before Congress acted. When Congress acted, it was able to merge its program into the national program.

But it was out there almost immediately. The same thing when there was a government shutdown recently, the state of North Dakota said, “well, for the people who are not getting paid, you know, we’ll provide them with support and with low interest loans to get them through, for people who have a problems with their mortgages as a result of these hardships, we’ll have forbearance and a moratorium.”

The bank allows the whole community to be more resilient and responsive. Public banking, we’re looking to do two things simultaneously. We’re looking for a systemic change, which gets technical when you dig below the surface of it. We’re also interested in the purposes to which a public bank can be put.

These things go hand in hand. But they’re really quite distinct. One of the things about the Bank of North Dakota is that half of its assets are in participation loans, which means that they are taking 50% of the loans that are being originated by the local banks. By doing that, they spread the risk, they have a collaborative relationship with those banks because they’re looking at the books and those obligations together, and it allows those local banks to take on larger projects than they would be able to based on their own capital, because they have the Bank of North Dakota behind them.

This participation model is one that we think is really, very, very sound. It is conservative from a financial and legal perspective, and it’s one that has served North Dakota extraordinarily well and we think it translates to other locations.

Walt McRee

And systemically, on the banking topic, we believe, I mean, it’s very clear, community banks and credit unions are essential financial infrastructure for any community, and our commitment, and the way we devise or design future public bank applications is to make a very clear distinction that we’re in a noncompetitive position, that what we do is collaborative partnering with their loans to build that business and to enable them to do new business.

So we think community banks and credit unions, the private ones, not the Wall Street ones, and up through new ones, not the Wall Street ones, are really, really important. That’s one of our focuses these days.

Peter Winslow

This is something that we think scales that is helpful both for big markets like Philadelphia and for small ones. In Philadelphia, if we want to do a major water project, we float a bond and support it with the bond. The bond is supported by the revenue stream that comes in from the water project and so forth.

A small town in North Dakota can’t go to the bond market. They don’t have the capacity. They’re not big enough. They can’t play in that pool at all. But if they want to do their water project, they can go to the Bank of North Dakota, get a long term loan at 1%, and do their water project.

So, the infrastructure needs across the country are extraordinary. They’re estimated to be in the trillions, like 5 to 7 trillion dollars of infrastructure projects that should be done in the United States to bring it up to world standards. That’s how far behind we are. One way to do that is with the public bank.

There’s a form of public banking, which is being proposed, which is the National Infrastructure Bank. So that’s a form of public banking that we support. It’s a different model than the one of the Bank of North Dakota, but also a public bank.

Scott Ferguson

Right. It’s important, I think, for listeners to realize who are new to public banking, that there’s not just one model there. Like anything, it’s a design question. What do you want to accomplish? Then you can decide what you want to design for. A bank is not like a simple, stable thing, like a pig or a cow.

Not to say that those are simple animals, but, we think of a cow as a cow is a cow is a cow. And maybe they’re not. But we think that way. And a bank is not just a bank, a bank, a bank. You can do all kinds of things with it. So, for example, I think this has been implied in what you’ve been saying, but, maybe to bring it out into the open as a kind of lesson, the Bank of North Dakota model is really a kind of banker’s bank, right?

There’s not a brick and mortar outlet for any old person just to come deposit their money in and get a car loan from. It’s really doing work at a higher level in assisting lower level banks, community banks, credit unions to help them be as robust as they can and socially responsive as they can, or as you can imagine, all kinds of other designs that maybe do dip into offering financial services.

It does seem like you all are more on Team “Not Compete” with the private sector. But you know, I think we at Money on the Left are maybe a little more comfortable with some crowding out, but that can be a productive tension.

Peter Winslow

Well there is another example in North America of a kind of public bank that competes. Yes, you are correct. We are attracted to the noncompetitive collaborative model, but the territorial bank of Alberta, there was a branch bank of Alberta that does full service banking in conjunction with private banks that also do the same thing.

It is a substantial bank that also anchors the community. So it’s not  a bad model, but it is a model that we don’t exactly reject, but we’re more attracted to the banker’s bank, wholesale banking model that is exemplified by North Dakota.

Walt McRee

To look at a variation of of that, if one were to work in an area like Montana or Wyoming or someplace where there are real huge banking deserts, if you had the wherewithal, the means, there was enough capital assets to create a bank in those areas, you could create a retail public bank in that setting where you’re not threatening the private industries.

Peter Winslow

Or even in an urban environment. There are lots of people who are unbanked and underbanked. If that’s the problem that you wish to address, you could have a public bank that would provide them with credit cards, to use their plastic, and that would be available.

Another form of banking that is attractive is postal banking, where all the post offices in the country can be places where people can go to do their banking.

00;37;36;07 – 00;38;22;02

Scott Ferguson

Do you know much about the history of postal banking in general? I’ll just take the opportunity to reference something that’s near and dear to my heart. So they’ve had postal banking in the UK, or they did. I know this because I am, in part, a film and media scholar and historian and during the 1930s, a man, a filmmaker named John Grierson, who nearly invented the form of the documentary. In Britain, he got public financing at an office and the name changed at different moments but for a lot of the period in which he was working and hiring people and commissioning films, it was part of the British Post Office. They made all kinds of public service announcements, advertisements for postal services. There’s a film that includes a W.H. Auden poem called Night Mail.

Some of these are really experimental and they’re part of avant garde cinema. In any case, there was one film that was commissioned to be made by a New Zealand filmmaker who had traveled to London, named Len Lye. He made several films. But the one film in particular that is so near and dear to my heart, is called Rainbow Dance, and it is for public banking.

You can tell that public banking kind of comes in at the end and you can tell he’s just kind of flexing his experimental cinema chops. I don’t think it would fly today, per se, but it’s a gorgeous film. It’s so lively. It’s so experimental. It’s so vibrant.

Every time I watch it, I think, “Wow. To live in a world where, you know, avant garde artists at the top of their game are creating incredible experimental esthetic works to celebrate postal banking, public banking. Oh my God.” So anyway, that’s my one in. But I’m curious what you all know about postal banking, its history and where did it go?

Peter Winslow

But, if you have the itch, you can still go to your postal service and get a money order. That’s what’s left.

Scott Ferguson

Right. What counts is banking? 

Peter Winslow

But public banking was pretty widespread in the 30s. It was really promoted, I think, by the Roosevelt administration.

Walt McRee

Postal banking disappeared in the 60s, I think. I believe it was from the pressure from the monopolists who control our banking world these days. There has been a desire to resurrect it, in part, because of the Postal Service’s own financial difficulties. But if you’ve been following those stories, you recognize that it’s one of the targets of the monopolists that want to privatize the Postal Service and keep their monopoly on banking, as well.

The unions of USPS were all in support of it, and they were ready to try a couple of models, a couple of examples of it, but it got shot down. And of course now, the postal board of directors, Scott, are all eight appointees of the Trump administration.

So everybody’s into where they can get a pound of flesh out of public assets and so you really have to fight for that. But I think that that’s one of the many fights that we’re faced with these days.

Billy Saas

So I know that there are, in Louisiana, publicly commissioned artworks, murals, from the New Deal era in those very post offices that would have been probably providing some of those banking services. The public-ness of the public bank does not exhaust itself in the finance question, it can be so much more.

Right. You mentioned, Walt, now a couple times, our current moment, and the urgency of public banking. I’m wondering with respect to your observation that the message is resonating more with more audiences today. If you could maybe reflect on what has worked and what has not worked as well, as you have been spreading the good word of public banking over the last 15 years. As you were talking about your history with PBI, there are, in terms of the timeline, many points of potential overlap and alignment between your story and Modern Monetary Theory as such, getting its own kind of national pseudo-mainstream moment. Part of their mission, as they’ve articulated it — I’m speaking of folks like Stephanie Kelton and Randy Ray — has been that, they might call it a little bit more directly, debunking, or where you’d call it demythologizing, clearing the way for an actual conversation to happen on the grounds of reality. They have talked and reflected in different ways about their approaches, their strategies for talking to audiences that are unable to see it clearly because of the mythology, because of the mystification, we might call it. I wonder what has worked best for you.

Do you have some strategies that you use? Certainly in talking to you, you have gone seamlessly into your description and history with us, with a sympathetic audience. But what does it look like when you approach folks who are maybe a little bit more cynical, skeptical, or flat out not having it?

Walt McRee

Yeah. The moment that we live in is fraught with all kinds of risk, danger and loss in terms of what the public has access to and what our assets have been and what we would like to have for the future. I think because that’s getting to strike home and so much in the way that the people are losing their assets and their prospects and feel disconnected from the economy that they’ve been working in, that there is a more receptive listening, that doesn’t help them understand banking too much.

I think if you tell them that money is made out, ex nihilo, of nothing, and it’s unlimited, and all of the principles that guide the wisdom of MMT, is still very much a skeptical word for a lot of people and yet people are hungry for some sort of parity, or at least fairness, in the economic world.

So I think the listening is changing out of the necessity to have some bright shining something or others somewhere on this. Also, as we see the corruption of the exploitation and how at every little point of juncture between the privately held powers of economic influence and connection are just sucking out the wealth of the people.

So the banks have been bullies. Will you come along with the idea that a bank can be a community asset? And you describe what public banks are and keep our money at home, invest in ourselves. So, we don’t have that already? Where is that? That’s the instinctive response. “We don’t have that already?”

So they’re still learning that they’re trapped in a system that has got them by their cahones and they don’t like it. So they’re willing to listen more to what we have to say about that.

Peter Winslow

We have to engage with multiple audiences. When we’re talking to most people, you go to a community meeting or your neighborhood association meeting and you talk about public banking, people get excited. They love the idea because at 35,000ft, what’s not to like? To have, in addition to the private banking system, a banking system that’s in the public interest rather than for private profit.

People get that and they love it there. Their concerns tend to be that if it’s public and it’s something that’s put together by our legislature or city council, how do we prevent this from being a slush fund? How do we prevent it from being corrupted with favoritism and so forth? So, discussion about governance becomes really, really important and all of that. When we’re talking to the people in the legislature, they get it and they can get pretty enthusiastic about it. Then it’s a question of convincing their colleagues, and then there are people who get campaign contributions from the people who are supporting the interests that oppose public banking. So you have that consideration. 

When we talk to our friends, our local bankers and credit union folks, they are interested, but they have some concerns about how that upsets their existing relationships. They have correspondent relationships with different banks. They have relationships with banks that give them investment advisory services and things of that nature. The same thing when you’re talking with officials who have connections with Wall Street and with investment banks, where they place their bonds. What’s this going to do to our bond rating? If we have a public bank, we say this will improve your strength and so forth. 

So each of these audiences has different concerns, and we talk to the people who are involved with affordable housing or business development and so forth. They get it for what their needs are. Same thing when we talk to the people in unions. It depends on who the audience is, what the concerns are and how we go about addressing those concerns.

Scott Ferguson

How about the mainstream press? And by mainstream, I mean a pretty broad swath. So like, it doesn’t have to just be our ill fated CBS News and The New York Times. It could also be, you know, major progressive magazines like The Nation and things like that. We have our own publishing platform and we do the best we can.

I’m assuming that maybe there’s a little bit more legibility with public banking. But, what about your own efforts? You know, Walt, you were involved in broadcasting and various forms of media, what’s your relationship to the press and to the journalistic world?

Walt McRee

We do exist on the periphery of development thought and policy and so forth. Because money is a bit of an esoteric pursuit, you have your own section of the newspaper for that. Of course, because we really find ourselves at odds sometimes with some of the principles of economy, that they’re operating a debt structure, a debt monopoly, and we’re talking about something that’s not that, that it’s entirely a different world, It’s kind of out there. They don’t think it’s maybe necessarily a mainstream concern. I would also say that our resources are limited and so we haven’t done a major job in moving the media forward as much as I would certainly love to do, but we’re working well past our weight already. But I do think that that is a conversation that’s going to change, in part because, I’ll give you an example, we have a national conference coming up in October in which we will build some awareness.

It’s called Public Banking, Public Prosperity: Declaring Financial Independence on America’s 250th anniversary, is an opportunity for us to focus on how we’re still trapped by the Bank of England. We’re still locked into the financial structure that made that, in part, as Ben Franklin said, was the reason for the revolution, which was because they wouldn’t allow us to create our own currency here.

That was the primary driver, according to him, in Philadelphia. And by the way, the public banking thing started in Philadelphia with the Quakers back around 1720-1730. It was community funding. Hey, you want to build a barn? Yeah. Here’s some money. We know where you live, and we’ll help you build it.

No taxes at all. We were all taking care of each other. I think you guys did a brilliant job illustrating the kind of liquefaction of public assets that can become part of a democratic financial policy and  platform. It’s a lower and smaller “d” but that’s part of the moment too.

We are at that point where the citizens are so threatened by their own survival, in their own futures, that we think they’re going to be paying a whole lot more attention about how we keep our money at home and not double the cost of our infrastructure by paying Wall Street. That’s the fact. When we go to the bond market, that immediately costs double, whereas if we find our finance ourselves, it’ll be a lot cheaper and we’ll also keep the profits as the Bank of North Dakota’s wonderful history has proved about how it’s grown.

Peter Winslow

So in Philadelphia, the leading newspaper is the Enquirer. We have access to the editorial pages of the Enquirer. When we do place editorials about public banking and public banking related issues that are important for the city, we’ve had that relationship for quite a while. We are not reported on a regular basis in the business section.

It would be nice if we were, but that’s not what the business section readers are interested in right now. So we do not really have access to the business section. However, at our conference in October, I’m pretty sure we’re going to have access to the front page of the Enquirer and that we’re going to be making news that is worth the Enquirer paying attention.

I think that will follow for other media. We have a monthly zoom program that we’re doing now. Coming up on our 54th edition of Financing Philadelphia’s Future. We invite the press to that, and periodically we get channel ten that will come in depending upon what it is that we’re discussing, we may get somebody from the media who will come and listen in. They don’t necessarily report on us, but they are keeping track of us.

I should mention that we do have some folks that are knowledgeable about public banking and interested in it and report on it, such as New City, and that’s also based here and has a national reach. It’s not the mainstream media, but it is a viable media outlet.

Walt McRee

I would just add that where there are local public bank initiatives like in California; Los Angeles, San Francisco, East Bay, Sacramento all have visible campaigns. They’ve been doing a great job. They’ve got a lot more people involved in their effort and focused on media work. This is a great story, and I think that it becomes increasingly relevant as we’re able to bring in the legislators who want to speak to it and look for an advantage.

In New Jersey, for example, Governor Phil Murphy, the outgoing governor of New Jersey, made it part of his public campaign for office. It was a winning message. It was very simple. He said, on the stump, “last year we spent a billion and a half dollars on building the infrastructure of the future in Japan because we would spend our money, then the Bank of America put it there. What did Bank of America do for us, for New Jersey? $250,000 in loans for the whole year.” 

The comparison was, are you investing locally or investing elsewhere? Another thing on our agenda is public pensions. Trillions of dollars of public dollars sit in the hands of private managers. They do not have a stellar track record of returns. They’re only focused on returns. The money’s not going into your communities, by and large. That’s one of the things that the Public Banking Institute is focusing on making some impact.

Peter Winslow

There are many ways in which a public bank can be capitalized. One of the simplest and most straightforward is to have the local municipal pension fund invest in the public bank.

Scott Ferguson

Absolutely. We had a behind the scenes call a little while ago and we were getting into some of the weeds and technicalities of public banking. How do you start a public bank? I don’t want this to get too wonkish or too nerdy, but I think a couple of examples might be helpful just to give our audience a sense of how there’s different ways of doing this.

I’m going to make a gesture and then you guys clean it up. You add and correct me. One of the dominant models here is you need a movement at the state level with state legislatures who are willing to create what often gets called a legal framework, a set of laws that make it possible to to charter a bank at the state or municipal level.

Then that clears the way, as they’ve done in California, to have local movements for a Bank of San Francisco or a Bank of Oakland, etc., etc. but that’s not the only way of doing it. We learned from you on our call that there are efforts to kind of circumvent that state process because, you know, that’s hard, and instead develop a kind of a public investment authority of some kind. You were even telling us about one model where somebody who was involved was a former banker and somehow had a legal charter already and so it’s allowing for the possibility of acquiring a bank. These are just radically different paths up the mountain.

Correct to me, flesh it out, paint a better and bigger picture than I’m able to.

Peter Winslow

As a practical matter, there are two pathways that we usually follow toward creating a public bank. One is, in one step, to go get a bank charter. You can get a bank charter by buying one, taking one that is already in existence and convincing the banking authorities that you want to convert that to public ownership, or to create it anew, in one step. What we found in Philadelphia and also is true in other places, is that sometimes it’s better or the pathway is to do it in two steps.

The first step is to establish an authority that does all the things that you want your public bank to do as a revolving fund, and have that authority seek a charter to become a bank. So those are essentially the two ways that we see as pathways. If, in Philadelphia, we could have done it in one step, we would have.

But, for a variety of reasons, we took a different path. We use the Pennsylvania economic development finance law, acts 1 and 2, which is on the books and has been used over and over again to establish public authorities for particular purposes and to establish the Philadelphia Public Financial Authority.

We were successful in doing that. We had legislation that was passed 17 to 1 in the city council. So there’s a veto proof majority and Mayor Kenney at the time declined to sign. So it went into law and is now an ordinance of the city of Philadelphia without his signature.

But in order to take the next step, the mayor needs to appoint the initial board of directors for the financial authority and mayor Kenney declined to do that and his successor, who voted for the legislation when she was on city council, Mayor Parker, has also not yet appointed the initial board of the financial authority.

Scott Ferguson

Are there reasons given? Is it just a kind of a timidity, a political risk aversion? What’s going on?

Peter Winslow

I think that there is a political power struggle that’s involved. In Philadelphia, we have the PIDC, the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, which has been around since the 50s and is very large. It is governed by the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, which are the established business and financial interests of the city.

They see a public bank as being a competitor, and they are not comfortable with the democratic governance structure that we have for the Philadelphia Financial Authority.They are saying, “well, you know, we already have institutions that can do all of these things.” We don’t because we don’t have a bank.

If you wanted to establish a bank, you could do it. We invite you to, and we would invite you to have democratic governance rather than the governance that exists for PIDC. So that’s the primary problem that we have. The other problems that they have are sort of saying, “can we afford it? Is there a risk that is involved in this, will the city have to be on the hook if things go belly up?” Questions that we really would like to have a conversation about, because we think that all of these objections really are smoke and that we like to blow that smoke away so we can see it more clearly.

Walt McRee

There are lots of reasons, or not reasons, but excuses that are put in the way and I think Peter touched on several of them, but one of them really is about the power structure. The power power politics. People don’t get into office these days without having money. The interest behind them, banks are very much a part of that scene.

As Dick Durbin said about Congress, “banks own the place.” That reality is part of our democracy. That is part of the corruption that is part of this moment. But starting a bank, it’s not against the law to create a bank, North Dakota proved that back in the 20s and 30s.

It’s not necessarily against the law. Depends on what your state constitution might say or what your limitations are for your municipal authority and so forth. They’re all different situations, but they’re not generally prohibitive of a community having its own bank. It depends. Obviously, it’s a complicated affair on some level.

But, the willingness to do so comes from the need. People say, “look, we really have to do something about our housing or our infrastructure,” and they don’t see a way that their tax base is going to swing it, then what, what kind of outcomes? The state of Washington is looking at that situation now yet again.

They’re out of their borrowing capacity. They’re running out of money, which is sort of a systemic failure of the monetary system. So we’re talking about a whole new horizon frontier of the ability for us to create our own money out of our own equity, in our own terms, and with our own mission.

This is the public option that exists not just for banking, but for other utilities, for the schools and environment. I mean, all of these things deserve to have the public power in place. So this is really about a systemic rejuvenation and renewal and I want to see a transformation into a new day where we’re not dependent on being supplicants to big money interests.

I would just say there are all kinds of things that happen along the way of making a public bank. A revolving fund, which is where they want to send you, which is what happened in New Jersey. They send it to a revolving fund. People need to know the difference between a revolving fund and a bank.

A depository bank enables your capital to be leveraged ten times, roughly speaking. Okay. Well, that’s a money tree, that’s a money cranking machine that has to be tempered and operated properly and balanced with risk and all of that. But it is a much different thing than a revolving fund now. To answer your question a little bit better, Scott, I would say, and as Peter pointed out, these intermediaries among municipal financial authorities or organizations are interim steps, fine. As long as they are part of a continuum of a purpose, that once we get this system working, once we demonstrate that we know how to do this, once we’ve got the public governance structure in place, once we’ve established the separation between this and government political control, then we can get on with formulating a working model for a local public bank. Totally doable.

I think you’re going to see that illustrated. I will give you one more example of how that has worked and I think it’s working excitingly in Vermont. Back in 2014, when we were working on that, the treasurer, who said, “look, I understand this, but I don’t like it though.”

Even though the state Congress approved it, she said, “as treasurer, I’m not going to do it. But I will tell you what I will do. We’ll put in a new plan called ‘10% for Vermont.’” What that was, they would use 10% of their available cash balance on deposit in a Canadian bank, but in a big bank.  “We’ll use 10% of our balance and you can use that for local investment. We’ll do it through our economic development agency.” That was 10-12 years ago? Well, since then they have had $30 million that wound up in local investment out of that effort. Now, 12 years later, it has gone from 10% to 12.5% and grown to one over $110 million of investment in the bank.

I think they’re in a different place where they say, “you know what, this is a good pile of money. We can really make this into a bank.” That is one approach that would be another way of starting a bank. Use your industrial or development authorities and agencies as vehicles, as capital sources to transform them into a depository, singular depositories, narrow banks, the things that are just used for specific public investment.

Those are very real, very available opportunities that do not require a great deal of heavy lifting or fabrication.

Peter Winslow

There are green banks around the country.

Walt McRee

…That are not banks.

Peter Winslow

…That are not banks, but they’re called green banks for solarisation projects and things of that nature. There are a lot of them around, but none of them are banks. If there were a bank, like in Philadelphia, we would be able to support the Philadelphia Green Capital Corp, which is our green bank in Philadelphia.

We’d be able to support them and their programs and be able to expand their programs enormously. But one of the things that may happen as the federal government starves the states and the cities, public banking is going to become increasingly attractive to the politicians because it’s a solution to their problem.

It’s a case that we have to make strongly because it’s the case that holds whether they’re starved from the federal government or not. It’s a question of the ability of a government agency in our federal system to exert its own sovereignty.

Walt McRee

The National Association of Counties recently did an assessment of that and said, because of the cutbacks at the federal level, these counties are looking at, in the next ten years, potentially a $1 trillion lack of resources that their budgets are not going to be able to compensate for because they weren’t designed to do this without federal support.

So, that’s part of this moment, the very dynamic moment for our money. It’s our money and people forget that it’s our money.

Peter Winslow

The public bank also can be a source of liquidity for local governments because the nature of the tax revenues are periodic and the nature of the expenditures are not.

Billy Saas

Well, as we start to wind down here, I want to direct our listeners to check out publicbanking institute.org, where you have more of your resources. But I want to ask both of you, pertinent to what you were just sharing, where else can people who are interested in following the latest in public banking, where should we be looking?

Where are the most exciting sort of moments for public banking right now?

Walt McRee

Well, I think we need to pay attention to what our neighbors’ needs are. What is needed? What is wanted? What must we stand for? To be driven by a mission. It’s always about a mission. The Bank for North Dakota had a mission. Every public bank has a mission. When you discover what it is that’s missing and needed, then you have a reason but also focus an energy that can be aligned around it.

I think that one of the things that we’re starting at the institute is a public banking community action network, which will be very much like an individual declaration of “I’m in favor of starting publicly owned financial institutions in my town.” We will be networking and creating a collaborative understanding where we can communicate with each other.

Not just within the sector of public banking interest, but in all of these other sections, like working families, community environmental justice and fairness, all of these other organizational frameworks become part of a common thread of community, of how we’re going to get this institutional framework established. The politicians are going to need to see the people standing together around this, because it takes an enormous amount of courage and even when they’ve got it, like Bob Asagawa, God bless him, up in Washington state, has been at this for ten years in the Senate. He’s still at it and it will take a while. When people stand together, that’s a whole new possibility. Again, part of this moment we’re in is where people are standing together.

We’re not going to be fooled forever about how we are being treated and how people are taking this opportunity to take our stuff away from us. 

Peter Winslow

It’s a national movement at the local level and people can watch what’s happening in the build up to the conference in Philadelphia in October. People can see what’s happening in their local states and cities. New Mexico has a very vital program that is looking toward success.

California has a framework, where a variety of cities are working on this. I don’t think we’ve mentioned New York very much, but New York is also a place, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Vermont, Oregon, Colorado, Colorado is very big.

You see on the Public Banking Institute website a map that shows where there are state and local initiatives underway and have links there to get in touch with your local effort.

Walt McRee

Yeah. I just want to reinforce that if you go to publicbankinginstitute.org, there’s an enormous amount of resources there to give you a background and links to things to really get the inside scoop on how the Bank of North Dakota works. There are five videos that are made of a presentation that Don Morgan, the president of Bank of North Dakota, made in New Mexico back in January.

Easy guy to listen to. He really lays it up straight. It’s not difficult at all to understand. But you see how beautiful the symmetry and the synergy is of how that bank works.

Peter Winslow

Individual websites in Philadelphia, like the philapublicbanking.org website. In addition to information about our combined effort that’s called, Project Beloved Community, which is built upon Martin Luther King Jr. ‘s concept of a beloved community, which is based upon a non-extractive economy.

All of the videos of Financing Philadelphia’s Future are there and on YouTube, and similar information is available in Colorado and Washington state and so forth. So there’s a lot of information that people can get, and through the Action Network, be in a position to join and coordinate with their neighbors.

Scott Ferguson

Well, Walt and Peter, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. We so look forward to future collaborations with you and we so thoroughly enjoyed this.

Peter Winslow

Thank you so much.

Walt McRee

Thank you very much for having us and guys, we really admire your work and, indeed, look forward to the future collaborations. We’re going to need each other’s brains and courage to press on. So, thanks.

* Thank you to Zachary Nosbisch for the episode graphic, Nahneen Kula for the theme tune, and Thomas Chaplin for the transcript. 

Billy Saas and Rob Hawkes speak with Sheridan Kates, ecological economist, activist and Green Party candidate for Islington Council in North London in the May 2026 local election. (Update: Since recording, Sheridan won her seat and is now an elected Councillor.) In her academic and political work, Sheridan rejects both the economics and the language of austerity, and instead prioritises democratic, inclusive, and participatory institution building. Sheridan’s activism extends into a commitment to public economics education via her work with Modern Money Lab UK, which held a series of public workshops in London and then a 2-day anti-austerity conference in Bristol in 2025. As a signatory to the Greens Organise ‘Pledge to Oppose Austerity in Local Government’, Sheridan both welcomes the gathering momentum behind campaigns for a UK wealth tax and argues that they do not go far enough. Amidst a new wave of excitement surrounding green politics in the UK, especially since Zack Polanski’s election as Green Party Leader in September 2025, Sheridan looks to a future where our economies are redesigned democratically to put people and the planet before profit.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

Billy Saas

Sheridan Kates, welcome to Money on the Left.

Sheridan Kates

Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.

Billy Saas

We are interested in talking to you about many things, but we want to start by asking you to tell us a little bit about yourself and how you found yourself where you are in your thinking now on economic and public policy.

Sheridan Kates

Yeah. Well, I have a bit of a circuitous route to where I am now. My background is completely unrelated to all of this. I started out as an engineer. I initially did a master’s in general engineering. I didn’t know if I was going to specialize in civil. I really loved the idea of building things that actually exist in the real world.

But my dad was a software engineer, so I basically went that route instead, specializing in electrical and computer science. I really did that for a long time. I worked in the tech industry. I ended up getting into the big tech worlds right out of college.

We probably knew it was starting along the evil routes but didn’t know quite as well some of the challenges that we see with some of these big tech firms that we are seeing nowadays. I was working at all these different types of companies and seeing that we were, in theory, really trying to do good by our users, right?

We wanted to create products that made their lives better. Then you’d find the things would start to really go towards the profit motive rather than what was good for the user. I don’t know if I should be naming names, but one of my big companies I worked for at the start of my career was Google.

When I started at Google, it was super clear what that ad was, right? You had a different colored background for the whole ad section. These are the ads, these are the search results. And over the years that’s become less and less obvious. I struggle as a relatively sophisticated computer user to see what an ad is on Google.

Now, there’s this tiny little badge that says ad. A lot of that is to get people to click more on ad results. They try to make sure that the users are getting a good result when they click through, but it just feels like it’s moving towards money and not actually good things for people.

I started moving through different companies and trying to see, “okay, well, you know, I’ll try and work on a company that’s like trying to help people through fighting the climate crisis or these types of things.” But then you would just find that all of them sort of ended up in this world and not necessarily even in a bad way.

They were just forced to compete in this world of capitalism where people have to choose the profit margin over what is good for users. At this climate company I was working at, in theory, it was doing this demand response for energy. So basically rather than firing off a gas power plant in the middle of the day when you needed more energy, it would say, “okay, you’re using a whole bunch of energy. Stop using energy for now, then other people will be able to use that,” and that in theory is good, right? You know, it basically means you don’t have to deploy another power plant. But they didn’t tell me before I joined the company that some of their biggest customers they were working with to turn off were bitcoin mines.

In theory, you’re helping the environment, but do we really want all these bitcoin mines? Could we not invest in battery technology instead of having all of these mines using energy? So again, this theme continued and it felt to me like I would never find a company that actually was going to be doing things in the way that I wanted.

And I came across Doughnut Economics in 2017, Kate Raworth and also Jason Hickel’s The Divide. At the time, I was very ignorant of the global north and my country’s role – both the UK and I also lived in the US for a very long time –  in subjugating the global South and then putting us in the situation that we’re in now.

Then I came across the concept of degrowth and I have gone on a journey of many masters. That was my second master’s, my master’s at the University of Barcelona. That degree is really fantastic. You can do it online, but it really gives you a very broad sense of what degrowth is.

Within that, I think you can kind of find your place and for me, the thing that really stood out was economics. We are told all over the place that we will not get the good things that we want if we do not continue to have growth. That’s how, in theory, governments are providing all of these public services, but understanding money for what it is, it basically meant that I felt that I really needed to understand this from a left perspective and so I did a final master’s. As part of that degrowth master’s was really understanding that I wanted to drill into post growth economics and how that could actually work in practice, how that really works with the money system. Steven Hail’s degree, at Torrens University, Modern Money Lab really felt like the right fit for me because that gave me the grounding that I would need to really be able to speak to how money works, why I’m moving towards a post-growth economy that wouldn’t crash the economy.

In fact, it would just be a really different way of thinking about things. I ended up quitting my job to do that master’s a couple of years ago. I was lucky. I have to be clear on that. The tech industry gave me this cushion that meant that I could go and try this other thing.

I’m very grateful for that. I think it’s important to not let yourself get sucked into that world where you’re just trying to get the bigger house and then just end up living up to your means. So I did try and set that up such that I could change into this other way of giving back.

I decided to go into economic education and Modern Money Lab is the place where that final degree was offered. We wanted to put together courses, like, Steven Hail is just so generous with his time, so we facilitated some of those courses here in the UK.

We also put together a conference which I think Rob came along to, which is great, but we just really wanted to get the word out there, to try and give a political education, which I feel is missing especially around money. It’s this big scary thing.

It’s really presented to be like, “oh, you know, don’t worry about this. You can’t understand it.” I really wanted to change that. I think the approach I’m taking right now is throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, because I also got very involved in the Green Party about four years ago and now in local elections here in Islington, which is where I live in the UK. 

What I like about the Green Party approach is that it is all about listening to people. I’m part of a team that’s been door knocking in the area that I’m working in for a decade or more. We started for this election that’s coming up in a couple of weeks two years ago. We started door knocking to find out what people had to say about the local area. We want to know what the green spaces were like, what the bin collections were like, just the stuff that really makes a difference in people’s lives. We’ve built up deep connections with people in that area now, and I think, as part of that, hopefully we’ll get elected, but we’re not going to stop door knocking after that. We want to keep doing it. We want to try and keep pulling people into forums like Peoples Assemblies where we can do participatory budgeting. I really love what Clara Mattei has been doing at the University of Tulsa with the FREE (Forum for Real Economic Emancipation) projects where she’s been doing lots of political education.

I’d love to be doing more of that locally. So yeah, it’s really kind of a wide range of areas. Oh, and the thing I didn’t mention on top of that is also the national policy. So we can probably get to this as well, separately. But, the Green Party of England and Wales, all of the policy is member driven and so we have these policy working groups and I’ve been working with the Economics Policy Working Group for about the last 3 or 4 years and then last year I took on the co-convening role of that group. So really trying to help both at a local level, but then also like a national level from the economics policy side for the Green Party.

Rob Hawkes

That’s really wonderful. Yeah. There’s so much we probably want to come back to many of the topics you’ve already raised there. I think that the point about education, about opening up conversations about money and economics, though, is such an important one. One of our friends and colleagues, part of the Money on the Left group is Jakob Feinig, his concept of monetary silencing is a really important one for us as a group.

It’s such a powerful concept. All of the conversations about what money is, to how it works, to who creates it, who gets to make decisions about where it will go, who can create money, why it can be created, what its purposes are and functions and the kind of mechanics of monetary design, monetary silencing kind of takes that off the table. Like you just said, it kind of puts us in the position of like, “:this is just the way it is, and you just have to kind of just get on with it or it’s too difficult for you ordinary people to understand.”

So, yeah, I wonder if you could just say a little bit more about those events. I was hoping to come to one of the events in London last year, and I think we were in touch around that time, but in the end I couldn’t make it. But yeah, there were two workshop events in London that Steven Hail ran as Modern Money Lab UK events and then of course the conference in Bristol that, again, I was unfortunately not able to get to in person, but I attended remotely. Can you say a bit more about what happened at those events, how they worked?

Sheridan Kates

So Steven Hail and then also Gabby Bond, who is the director of the Modern Money Lab group in Australia. Steven and Gabby put together some fantastic courses. I really love the way they’ve done it, actually. It’s broken out into modules throughout the day.

It’s almost like a taster, actually, for the two intro modules for the master’s that I did. Basically, the way that it works is that Steven will give a lecture for like 30 minutes at the start, but then they have breakout groups and they’ll randomize everyone in the room. So it’s super social.

You get to meet all these different people and then you talk about the concepts that you just heard. It might be like, you have a section on exchange rates or a Doughnut Economics crash course and then you come back into the room about what you’ve learned, but it’s kind of putting everyone on an equal footing and hopefully encouraging people by saying things like, “you know, no silly questions.”

You know, everyone is just sharing their knowledge and getting that out there. It also pulls in the Finding the Money film, which I think is a really useful pedagogical tool, which I US-focused. We need to get the UK Finding the Money. That always blows people’s minds too.

It’s just a really, really good overview. A really key feature that I really think we should be focusing and centering in all of our work is food, right? You know, there’s food included and people are eating together over lunch and there are snacks all through the day.

Clara Mattei does this as well with her FREE gatherings. I say FREE gatherings, it stands for the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation. That kind of community is really built around food and then safety around questions and unsilencing or demystifying money.

So that was incredibly powerful. I should definitely plug – or Steven will kill me – that he’s coming back in the summer to the UK and all over Europe. Maybe we can share this in the show notes or something? He is coming to Brighton and various other places over Europe, so we should definitely let your listeners know about that.

And then the conference, what we wanted to do with that was try to open up these concepts outside of just the people who come to economics conferences. We have had like three areas of focus; health, housing and employment and making sure that there are jobs out there.

What was really compelling about that is that you can get people from groups who weren’t necessarily thinking about this and just sort of present, “okay, well, is this a different lens of thinking about how government spending works and the power of public money to fund the things that you are advocating for.”  I don’t know how these organizations feel about it, but it’s almost like you either want the funding or you want to put yourself out of a job, because this should be provided by the government. I don’t think we’re ever going to put ACORN [Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now] out of a job because ACORN does fantastic community organizing. Even if everyone had a house I’m sure we’d still need that. Some of the charities around poverty and all this kind of stuff, in the ideal world, I don’t think would exist.

If we can help all of these organizations understand how government finances actually work and what the real world constraints are to spending rather than the perceived ones. That was really the goal. So we specifically didn’t call the conference like anything around any school of thought, we called it The Anti-Austerity Conference. We pulled in the Keynes quote, “anything we can actually do, we can afford.”

I think it went down well because of pulling together academics, but also people from the different groups. We really tried to make sure that the online experience was as good – as much as possible – as the in-person, again, really prioritized food. There was a fantastic onsite cafe in Bristol, who did really good catering for us.

But yeah, I think those are themes of how we try and put these things together. The thing about the conference is, we’ll think about how that should evolve and we’re all doing different things, throwing the spaghetti at the wall just to see what sticks, but I do like the goal of reaching out beyond our own community. That is where we want to continue to go.

Rob Hawkes

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. The online experience was great as far as I was concerned, although it was Bring Your Own Food if you were an online participant. But yeah, I’ve got the full title:  “The Anti-Austerity Conference: Anything we can do, we can afford,” which is, like you said, the Keynes quote, “debunking money myths to end austerity in the UK.”

One thing that did stick in my mind from being an online delegate at that conference was a moment where you were directing a Q&A after a panel, after a paper, and you quite deliberately said, “I want to hear from someone who’s not a man next.”

I think those were your exact words.

Sheridan Kates

Yes.

Rob Hawkes

Why did you say that? I mean, why do you think that was an important move to have made and perhaps how it speaks to a kind of a wider issue and an ongoing one in conversations around economics?

Sheridan Kates

Yeah. I mean, obviously there are very few non male voices in this space and often they are the loudest. I think it’s really crucial to just remind people that their voices are as important and the more that you hear someone else who isn’t a man ask questions, and they sound like you, even though it might seem small, but, I think it really does matter. It also just shows that the space is for you. It was also part of the outreach, honestly, like, we really tried to make sure that we didn’t just have a room full of the usual suspects, I do keep getting that feedback at the events that we run. They are more diverse than the ones that you typically see.

Like, we also had an event actually in UCL (University College Longon) that was a screening of Finding the Money. We had an entirely packed out, very hot room, where Zack Polanski came along and ended up doing a panel with Patricia Pino, Josh Ryan-Collins, chaired by William Thomson and that had such a range of people, like ages, genders, I think it’s just really important to make sure that we understand that economics is for everyone and keep calling that out.

Rob Hawkes

Yeah, absolutely. The Modern Money Lab master’s has ringfenced scholarships for Global South students that are specifically for women. So, so yeah, that’s kind of a little part of this wider, important conversation, isn’t it?

Sheridan Kates

Absolutely. And again, I would be remiss to not say if anyone who has money would like to sponsor more of those you can definitely reach out to Steven and Gabby we’d love to get more of those available to people. Every bit of support helps.

Rob Hawkes

It’s a wider question, isn’t it, in terms of who studies economics, who feels that they’re kind of entitled to contribute to conversations around economics. It’s bound up with other questions. When this episode goes out, Billy will have introduced it with our usual introduction to Money on the Left as a podcast that reclaims money’s public powers for imaginative intersectional politics.

Yeah. How important is intersectionality to the way we think about economics?

Sheridan Kates

Yeah, huge. Obviously, so much of the issues we see are exacerbated along racial lines. Looking at, for example, health inequalities. We see in the NHS (National Health Services) that people of different racial backgrounds are treated differently. We need everyone’s voice at the table to be inputting exactly how money should be spent and not just with equality, but from an equity perspective.

There are areas that have been massively underserved for many, many years. Where can that be improved?

Billy Saas

So part of your activation and your mobilization post-Modern Money Lab master’s has been these events and the organizing and being active in the Green Party, you’ve also been writing in those contexts. I wanted to ask you a bit about a piece that was published in November where you talk about wealth taxes in the UK. The piece that we’ll also link to in the show notes is called “Wealth taxes don’t go far enough.” Per the Modern Money Lab conference, there’s some debunking work that needs to be done around wealth taxes. Could you walk us through the scene there in the UK around progressives advocating aggressively for a wealth tax and where you’re wanting to see that argument go and evolve?

Sheridan Kates

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I’m hugely supportive of wealth tax from an inequality perspective. The thing that advocating for wealth tax really helps us is pointing to the enemy in a lot of ways. Right? The elites have just been allowed to run away with money accumulation.

Pointing out that there’s going to be a shift towards ensuring that those types of people are taxed fairly. Why should someone who’s earning an income be relatively taxed a lot more than someone who’s getting money from capital gains and dividends? That kind of thing.

So I think that’s fantastic. I think the trap that you can get into is when you claim that it’s going to pay for everything, that the money that you’ll get from wealth taxes will cover all of the things that we need to do. I point out in the article that the numbers are vast.

There’s hundreds of billions that need to be found every year just to get our public services back to a few years ago when they were already highly degraded, they need to be much better. We need massive programs of both building, but also buying back homes to turn them into social homes, because we used to have some of the best social housing in the world here in the UK.

Now the government spends the vast amounts of money that it used to spend building council homes on funneling money directly to private landlords via housing benefits. That is just absolutely shocking. There’s a lot of money that needs to be found and the numbers don’t add up if you’re just going to be looking at wealth taxes.

This is just the start of a long journey and I think that with that blog was, there’s a particular kind of audience that will read a big blog like that, but I’d love to work more on getting some short form video stuff out there that could appeal to a range of people, but trying to get people less terrified about the idea of government spending.

What does it really represent? How does it compare to like, for example, the private credit or private credit creation that no one talks about. It’s obviously vast. Just speak to the power of government investment, especially in these industries where private companies aren’t going to get the returns.

I think Brett Christophers speaks so well about the shift towards renewable energy. The profits that you get from renewable energy are so much lower than the ones you get from fossil fuels, even nuclear to an extent.

You are not going to get the private sector to build all of this. It really has to be from the public sector, or you get into a situation where the public sector has to subsidize the private sector to build all these renewables and then the benefit of the lower prices doesn’t filter through to consumers.

You then get what we see in the UK, where net-zero is seen as a dirty word now, because there’s been all of these renewables and yet, energy prices are at all time highs. So yeah, really drawing attention to the fact that it’s not just about wealth taxes is just super key in this environment.

Billy Saas

It’s such a great conversation starter. I mean, talking about the political education of thinking about money and thinking through money, it’s something we talk about a lot. How financial literacy and the conventional refrain is sort of apolitical, but financial literacy and the critical frame that we prefer and assume is very active to what you’re up to is political to the core. I know that you’ve been doing a lot of listening and canvasing, but have you had much opportunity to share these ideas with those who have not been previously initiated into them? And if so, what’s the reception been like?

Sheridan Kates

I think it does make sense to people. I think you have to adjust for where they’re coming from because, if you’re talking to someone who thinks they know how this stuff works. You know, maybe they’re a bit of crypto investing on the side. You don’t know what you’re going to get when you’re doorknocking, right?

You have to be really careful to think about where that person’s at and whether it makes sense to be having this big conversation on the doorstep if you’ve knocked on their door unless it comes up. I think that’s tricky.

I think a lot of people came to the Bristol conference without a huge understanding of this stuff. I think like some people were saying they’ve basically been lying to us like when they learn this stuff. Obviously there’s a lot of nuance that comes on top of it.

We’re not trying to say that this is limitless, but it’s just a different kind of constraint. We know we want to be thinking about the real resources as the constraints and environmental constraints. There are planetary boundaries. Just because we can afford to reopen coal mines, should we? From an environmental perspective, probably not.

There is somewhat of an excitement in learning this stuff, but I think it’s on us to find better ways of getting to the point across snappier and in a faster way because I don’t know that I’m always the best at it. Sometimes, I think you can lose people.

Obviously people care about their bills right now, right? The cost of living crisis in the UK is horrific. If you can explain how these things will make their lives better, then, great. We have to get to the point where we’re making it clear to people we’re not trying to prove something to them that there’s a reason why we’re talking about this, that we understand what their real issues are and then get to the point where you capable people are telling me that we can’t afford this unless you increase everyone’s taxes. Look at that. Now we can have a conversation about this. But yeah, I think it’s about picking your moments.

Billy Saas

And knowing your audience. I think that’s critical. This person I knocked on the door of, do they want to talk about money or am I interrupting their dinner?

Sheridan Kates

Quite so. I will make it clear that that does not come up much on the door. Really, people care about the potholes and when their bin doesn’t get picked up. 

Rob Hawkes

Right. It makes sense, in lots of ways, why the wealth tax conversation happens in the way it does. For anyone that’s kind of broadly willing to get on board with the idea, it makes sense. We can see that, there are the rich people, they have the money and so if we want to do more things for the public, we need to get some of that money. That’s an easier concept for most people to get their head around then. Well, money is a public utility that is inexhaustible and we just need to decide democratically on how we go about using the power of public money creation…

Sheridan Kates

…to mobilize the scarce, real resources that we actually have and then that’s the hard conversations, which I think is really compelling. I think what’s fascinating right now is this whole AI situation, right? Obviously this is like booming and people really don’t have any say in this. Some people find it can be cool for certain situations and stuff, but ultimately people feel like they have to learn this stuff otherwise, they’re going to get left behind. But if we can have democratic conversations about, “okay, well, these are the real resources that are actually having to be used for this whole AI boom. Do we want to be using this for this purpose? What is the impact on the environment?” and have conversations around this and maybe change the way that we approach this. I think that’s really compelling.

Rob Hawkes

Yeah, absolutely. In your piece, I’ll quote you, “In a world where we’re no longer scared of losing rich people’s money because we know it doesn’t fund our public services, we can set up direct democratic institutions like people’s assemblies and use them to decide, as a society, how much money we want to allow anyone to have for themselves.” And potentially lots of other things, too. How does that kind of democratic institution building feed into your thinking?

Sheridan Kates

I think there are multiple levels of which this needs to start happening. A lot of the local doorknocking we’re doing is about wanting to set up participatory budgeting and people’s assemblies. Also, there’s a pledge from the Greens Organise organization that 800 councilor candidates signed up for, where essentially we would try and mobilize people locally through trade unions, through local councils, but basically have them lobby up to central governments that we need like wealth taxes. It is still important to push for those, but also things like restructuring the way that we deliver social care. So right now that is completely delivered by private equity, pretty much. We want to restructure that to then take those organizations back into local economies and employ local people, making sure the money stays locally.

Building those blocks needs to start locally. But then there’s also other initiatives here in the UK around abolishing the House of Lords and potentially replacing that with the House of the People. Maybe you could get people elected through sortition, to do a four year term that they would get trained for. That would mean that anyone could come and do this like extended jury service or something like that, so that the interests of people are actually coming in rather than the interests of unelected representatives as in the House of Lords and not really democratically elected in other cases.

Rob Hawkes

Yeah. I just wondered if we should do that with the head of state as well. We should just sort of draw lots and everyone gets a turn.

Sheridan Kates

Yeah, absolutely. With the right training, I feel strongly that that should be within reach.

Billy Saas

I feel like there were a series of films in the 1990s that that was their central premise, more or less. Just like average-Joes making it to the highest…

Rob Hawkes

King Ralph wasn’t it? There was King Ralph.

Billy Saas

So there you go. I think there’s one called Dave.

Rob Hawkes

But yeah, we can include the pledge in the show notes as well because it is a really great set of commitments and talking points. One of them being an emergency summit to make communities heard, which is a commitment from all the signatories. Do you want to say more about that? 

Sheridan Kates

Yeah, I mean, basically we want to keep this momentum. We have some kind of green wave happening. I’m touching all the wood around me. If we live up to this expectation, we should see a lot of green councilors coming up after the elections in the next couple of weeks.

We’re in a crucial decade for the climate crisis. We’re in a crucial time for people’s affordability. Everyone is having a really hard time right now. The rejection of the two main parties is happening right now. So with the Tories and Labour, many people are going towards Reform on that because they feel like they have this different story.

But a lot of people now are coming to the Greens and we need to show them that we are not just like the other parties. We are going to do things differently. We are going to take the trust that they’ve put in us and build something in a democratic way and this summit is key to making sure that that momentum continues and we don’t just end up being like the other people who just get into power and don’t have anything happen. So yeah, active planning happening on that. Like I said, we want to make sure that trade unions are involved because it’s a very exciting time.

Billy Saas

For those of us in the United States maybe, but elsewhere in the world, who aren’t as up to date on the Green wave, could you catch us up on the more exciting moments.This episode will be published in the middle or certainly close to those elections.

Sheridan Kates

Like six days before.

Billy Saas

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what should we be paying attention to or what should we know as that ramps up?

Sheridan Kates

Yeah. So a quick summary. There was kind of a little bubble back in 2015 for the Green Party, which kind of got eclipsed by Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour Party. There were very similar values. A lot of those people went over to Labour. We know what happened there with the election in 2019. Since then, there’s been a bit of a languishing. There’s been various things cropping up, but last year Zack Polanski ran for leader and I mean, Zack’s really awesome. I think I wish he’d been sort of on our radar from the economic side as well for a long time, because I went to a Green Party conference in Bristol in 2023, and he was deputy leader at the time and in his speech said, “government’s budget is nothing like a household.” And I’m like, “oh, well, I wasn’t familiar with your game, Zack!” I then reached out to him to try and get him to be a speaker on our panel at the UCL Find the Money event that I mentioned earlier..

So we’ve been trying to get him along to all of these events and actually we had asked him for the MML (Modern Money Lab) Bristol event, literally as he announced his leadership bid. I think we got very lucky because he ended up doing our conferences as one of the first things he did when he was leader and massive kudos to him that he didn’t cancel.

He really believes in his commitments. So thank you so much to Zack for coming and speaking about the political situation in the UK.

Rob Hawkes

It was like the days after he was elected, wasn’t it?

Sheridan Kates

It was days after. I think we just got so lucky because we asked him months prior. I knew that Zack would do really well. It’s been fantastic to see his rise, but I think what’s really key, though, is to call out that nothing has changed in terms of Green Party policy.

We’ve always had these really good social policies. We’ve always had these really strong environmental policies. Zack is just an incredible communicator. He’s really gotten out there. He really understands social media. From the start of Zack’s campaign, he added a lot of members to the Green Party, but after he got elected, it’s just been this crazy trajectory. Like we had maybe about 60,000 members roughly, and now we have more than 225,000. It’s only been just over six months. We are probably the second largest party at this point in the UK because the Labour Party has stopped reporting its membership numbers.

Reform is still up ahead, but we are quickly closing. The other really amazing thing that happened was the by-election in Manchester. So, Hannah Spencer is amazing and she ran an amazing campaign against both Reform and Labour, coming out on top. That’s the first time the Greens have ever won a by-election. So I think all of these things compounding are just really showing that the Greens are no longer a small party.

We’re one of the major parties. It’s also kind of wild because we have five party politics now in the UK with our first-past-the-post system. This is really causing, I think, a lot of instability. I think we are kind of lucky in that we do have this situation where an insurgent party could come in and create this kind of upset.

I know in America it’s a lot harder with the way that everything is structured. I think we are going to have to try and move towards a proportional representation approach, because otherwise we really run the risk of an unstable government, year-to-year.

Rob Hawkes

Right. For any listeners unaware in other parts of the world, Reform UK is Nigel Farage’s party and is likely to turn into a very kind of Trumpist government if elected and for a long time the opinion polling has been really frighteningly showing a big lead for Reform.

And yet, as well as membership numbers for the Greens surging, the polls have been kind of creeping closer and closer. At least one recent opinion poll actually put the Greens kind of slightly ahead or a fraction of a percentage point ahead. 

Sheridan Kates

That’s right. The average of polls are showing definite drops for Reform now and Greens on the way up. So we just have to keep at it with the hard work. But I think it’s quite an exciting time.

Rob Hawkes

I want to just go back to that sentence you mentioned from Zack Polanski about the government not being like a household. Zack Polanski said the government is not like a household, as you say, before he was elected leader, but he said it on the day he was elected leader. He went on BBC, the flagship BBC Newsnight program.

I think it’s difficult to maybe get across to listeners outside the UK of just how that was quite an extraordinary moment, actually. It was the first time I’d heard anyone on a kind of mainstream BBC flagship news program, sit on the sofa and say, “government budget’s not like a household.”

He said something similar again in a major speech of, around a month ago, at the New Economics Foundation, on economics. I imagine that most Money on the Left listeners will be familiar with this, though, and it’s not a surprise to many of our listeners.

But, why was that such an important thing to say and such an extraordinary thing for a leader of a major British political party to say?

Sheridan Kates

Especially since the 80s when Thatcher told us “there’s no such thing as public money, it’s only taxpayers money,” we very much have adopted and endorsed this idea that we need to balance the budgets. Austerity years, like we were sold by George Osborne, that we had been very irresponsible as a government before the financial crisis and the only way to address this was via austerity. I think he actually even referenced that Rogoff and Reinhart paper that was discredited and I don’t think that was ever actually a big kind of reckoning to that publicly. Basically saying that we needed to reduce our debt, where all of the measures for austerity only increase the debt.

So we’ve really been playing in this sphere where the government doesn’t have any money, and we need to be taxing it and we can’t be borrowing because look at those yields, look at the interest rate that it has to pay on the bonds.

It’s much higher than all these other countries and she’s really got to tighten her belt. So I think just having a major politician out there saying, “well, you know, actually this is not the analogy we should be looking at.” The BBC actually has been pulled up in the past for saying things like “maxing out the credit card” and saying that there is no money left, but they continue to do it.

Having a politician on there challenging them, and I think honestly really throws them and it’s delightful to see presenting this alternative. I think he does it in really good and interesting ways as well. Speaking to things like multipliers where it’s just common sense, right?

That if you spend money into the economy and it goes to a place that’s going to then be circulated multiple times in the economy, rather than just going directly to subsidize some billionaires to provide Covid personal protective equipment, which is like a large part of what happened on our side, then this is actually a really big benefit to the economy.

So, yeah, I think it’s just a real game changer. The thing that we really need to do now is find more people in Zack’s position, because he can’t be the lone voice out there. I think we need to give him cover and make sure that more people are talking about this publicly.

Rob Hawkes

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think the other thing that has really struck me from the things that he’s been saying is the emphasis he places on storytelling. He often says, telling a different story is really important. Of course, as a humanities kind of person and at Money on the Left where, you know, we’re all about kind of narratives and metaphors and storytelling as so fundamentally important.

I’ve said and written myself saying that storytelling is another word for accounting. The way we account for things in monetary terms is all to do with how we tell stories about who’s important, who matters. It comes back to those questions we were talking about before, of the kind of intersectional questions of whose voices are loudest, whose voices are being pushed to the margins. It is partly to do with how we tell stories and how we account for people.

Sheridan Kates

Yeah, that’s really interesting.

00;43;51;16 – 00;44;16;25

Rob Hawkes

Kind of tied to that point and going back to the documentary Finding the Money, Maren Poitras’ brilliant film. Maren’s a former guest on Money on the Left many years ago when she was making the film. But, another former guest, Lua Yuille, says in the film a line that really sticks in my mind from it, “if money is natural, then who has the money is natural as well.” Again, it comes back to the kind of monetary silencing thing. If we accept that everything is the way it is, that is just the way it is, then, the kind of the status quo is natural as well.

Five men have all the wealth and the power. But once you start to realize, “oh, the system has been designed this way, but we could design it differently,” that’s when we can open up new kinds of conversations and new ways of imagining the future.

Sheridan Kates

Yeah, exactly. Actually, I really loved one of Zack’s Bold Politics podcast episodes recently. This author, Zakia – I have completely forgotten her last name, I hope we can drop that in the show notes as well – (Zakia Sewell) wrote this book called Finding Albion. It is all about finding the old folk tales from thousands of years ago that center completely different people.

So,even the name Albion is the old name for England. It references white, but it’s not necessarily clear what that white was. Was it the white cliffs of Dover? There’s also a story about this Syrian refugee who went to England. Her name was Albia and she set up a matriarchal society there.

These stories that got lost through history, the ones that got kept are the ones that they wanted to be kept right. The ones that they had was the history that they wanted to teach people, to believe that we were just amazing in the two world wars and don’t think about what we did in the Empire. It’s all about thinking how we frame stories, which stories we bring to the forefront.

I think that is also the way to convince people that the story might be living through right now could also be different. So I think that that episode is really great.

Rob Hawkes

There was a bit of a hooha, as we say in the UK, about the potential redesign of banknotes about a month ago, wasn’t it? The Bank of England announced that the banknotes were going to be redesigned and the new designs were going to feature animals on them.

Nigel Farage in particular got very upset. A man in the Newsnight and in the BBC Question Time audience got very upset about it as well and blamed those Greens and he said, “oh, it’s those greens with that kind of woke agenda that are responsible for all of this.”

Nigel Farage posted a video about replacing Winston Churchill with a beaver, and he literally said, “I’m not making this up. They’re going to replace Winston Churchill with a beaver.” He obviously was making it up because the Bank of England quite clearly has said they haven’t decided which animals are going on the banknotes anyway.

Sheridan Kates

That was not to mention the fact that it was voted for by the public. 

Rob Hawkes

Yeah, it’s a democratic monetary design. 

Sheridan Kates

Exactly.

Rob Hawkes

It seemed sort of silly or you could dismiss it as a bit of a silly media moment, but it was telling, wasn’t it, that he was upset about replacing Churchill, but he wasn’t upset about Jane Austen or Alan Turing.

Again, it sort of comes back to question kind of whose stories are we telling and who’s the center of the story.

Billy Saas

Perhaps we could find our way down by doing a little bit of storytelling – Sheridan, if you’ll indulge us – about the kind of the future that you see yourself fighting for that is motivated by or at least sort of supported in some way by this kind of public money perspective, we’ll call it. What do you see coming down the line? I think we could all use a little bit of that optimism that you referenced or alluded to before. How do we be positive about where we’re going?

Sheridan Kates

Yeah. Gosh. When you’re so focused on helping people with the problems of the now, and then you have to jump back up to e visions of the future, I do think that is really compelling. I think ultimately, democracy, but proper democracy, direct democracy underpins all of this.

Just thinking about, collectively, how we can design a better society. If we were thinking about the kinds of jobs we thought should exist in the world or just in our country to start with, just look at even the NHS situation where resident doctors are graduating their programs and there’s no placements for them to move on to.

Understanding that that’s a designed world. The world that we could create would make sure that all of the placements that we need for all of the doctors and to staff the struggling NHS, this would be a conversation that we could have together. Money should not be the thing that holds that back.

It’s the real resources. Here we have resident doctors who literally could be going into these placements, and so extending that to every part of your life. Obviously, the unions won the five day working week, but you know, with fewer jobs available, why shouldn’t we be thinking about making these four day working weeks so that we have more time to spend in our communities, with our families, and think about all of these things about how we should design the world. 

I think moving towards a framing of efficiency, which is something that we don’t really talk about. In this world where we talk about growth, how do we keep growing the economy so that, in theory, some of that will trickle back down to provide the services that we all care about.

Well, what if we actually were just designing the economy to provide those services in the first place? I think it’s just an incredible rethinking of how, rather than just leaving things up to the market, we can work together collectively. There are huge multinational businesses already who are doing this kind of design, like at Google, where I worked, you couldn’t launch a new product until you talked to the team that controlled all the machine resources. If you needed to launch something that was going to increase the amount of traffic to a Google service by a certain amount, you need to make sure that those machines are there because otherwise, the whole thing’s going to fall over.

So they want you to believe that it’s far too complicated for us to design our economy in this way. But, some of these companies have annual revenues that are higher than entire countries. If they can do it, why can’t we do it? When you start to understand that this is within your control, we could be completely transforming our streetscapes in city areas, we could be training up people to restore the beautiful parts of the environment. We could move away from ads everywhere.

It could be public art, or it could be advertising community events. There are all these things going on in people’s areas, but they don’t know about them. The epidemic of loneliness is another huge issue in the current situation that we’re in. Then obviously, as part of this as well is moving away from fossil fuels. We are in a scary time. It’s hard to talk about it without freaking people out but the temperature rises that we’re seeing are pretty intense. This was supposed to be the decade that we were stopping the increasing EV emissions and getting that back down again. Understanding that through public money, we could be investing in that complete transition, but also not in a way that just requires business-as-usual, but just with renewables. We get back to this “efficiency” conversation here, right?

Do we need AI, for example? Like if we didn’t have AI, maybe we could have far fewer data centers and require far fewer renewable resources. Everything is connected. I think it’s work. It’s a different kind of work, but I think it’s a nourishing work that actually puts us in a kind of communion with the people who are around us and makes us realize that we’re not just all individuals.

Billy Saas

That’s beautiful. I’m all in.

Rob Hawkes

That’s really wonderful.

Billy Saas

You’re a great storyteller, and I appreciate that. Yeah.

Sheridan Kates

Oh thank you. So sweet.

Rob Hawkes

Yeah. Absolutely. That’s really wonderful. You might have just answered what I was just about to ask you, but one of the things that still comes up or one of the lines of attack now against the the Green Party of England and Wales is that it’s not really green anymore or it’s been kind of it’s just been taken over by the Corbynites who left the Labour Party and it’s about these kind of crazy economic ideas or it’s about wokery, but it’s not really interested in the environment anymore. I think you may have answered that, but do you have any more to add? 

Sheridan Kates

Yeah, I think it’s wild. I think a lot of these attacks are coming from people that it’ll take a while for them to kind of come along to this way of thinking. Anyway, those policies are not going anywhere. It’s just that people already know that we are for the environment. The brand that we need to be building is that we are about people and planet.

Zack likes to say this thing, “Our vested interests are not big businesses. We only have two vested interests: people and planet,” and so many of these things are connected. This kind of goes back to the start of my journey. Seeing the relentless quest for profit, all of these things are connected to the continuing stress that we’re putting on the planet. There’s evidence that we can decouple carbon emissions from GDP because of renewable energy, but then obviously, there’s also the issue of the sacrifice zones. We mean the mining areas in Chile or the Congo where we’re taking these minerals or deep sea mining right now, which is a terrifying idea. There’s all these minerals on the bottom of the ocean that they can scrape them up with big trawlers, but they don’t understand what that will actually do to the whole ecosystem.

Just as a normal person and just thinking about, “would this be a good idea?” It seems like a terrible idea. Yes, there’s some decoupling from GDP and emissions, but there is no evidence whatsoever that there’s any GDP decoupling from material use, anything that is driving GDP is very much increasing material use.

Even with the emissions, decoupling is not happening fast enough. We need to be on a pathway where we are massively reducing, especially in the global north. People will say, “okay, the UK is a small percentage of like the overall emissions,” but historically we are not a small percentage. The Industrial Revolution started here.

It is on us to be at the forefront of making sure that we decarbonize, and we’re very much not at the forefront right now. Obviously, China’s doing a fantastic job, but it, overall, still has high emissions. But it is on us and why should any other country do this if the people that originated the Industrial Revolution don’t do it as well.

So, yeah, I could talk about green stuff all day, but, I also want to talk about the way that people’s lives could be different because that’s so connected.

Billy Saas

That feels like a splendid place to end it. Sheridan Cates, thank you so much for joining us on Money on the Left.

Sheridan Kates

This was an absolute pleasure. Thank you. 

Rob Hawkes

Thanks so much.

* Thank you to Zachary Nosbisch for the episode graphic, Nahneen Kula for the theme tune, and Thomas Chaplin for the transcript. 

We speak with Ely Fair, who studies structural inequality and poverty in urban geographies from a heterodox perspective. Fair holds a Ph.D. in Economics from University of Missouri, Kansas City and is presently a visiting instructor in Economics at Knox College. 

Examining the institutions responsible for social valuation, maintenance, and transformation at the neighborhood level, Fair focuses especially on the role of housing policy in the racialization of U.S. cities. During our conversation, Fair not only spells out important discoveries in this critical research, but also outlines several positive policy solutions designed to remediate the unjust development of urban geographies.

In doing so, Fair explicates his work on the legal history of complementary currencies in the United States, emphasizing the generative role they can play today in advancing housing justice, empowering municipal governments to mobilize labor to create and maintain safe and affordable housing.

Lastly, Fair relays his findings about The Freedman’s Savings Bank. Specifically, he contends that the bank’s collapse was a result of the federal government’s “negligent paternalism,” creating a moral and equitable obligation for the U.S. government to finally restore the outstanding deposits. From here, Fair proposes a targeted program of restitution that leverages digitized archival records to identify and compensate approximately half a million Black American descendants.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

Billy Saas

Ely Fair, welcome to Money on the Left.

Ely Fair

Thanks. Glad to be here.

Billy Saas

Would you kick us off by just telling us a little bit about yourself and your background, how you came to the sort of questions that you’re asking in your research?

Ely Fair

Yeah. My name’s Ely Fair. I have a PhD in Economics from University of Missouri, Kansas City. I’m currently teaching at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Most of my research is motivated by structural inequality and poverty. I got quite interested, while living in Kansas City, in the racialization of cities, how cities intervene in housing policy and the history of the landscape within Kansas City, which is characterized by starkly divided race and income and therefore also neighborhood quality.

It’s actually a strange town because it was built going south and then about 50 years later, they white-flighted it going south. So there’s a race line that runs directly through town, and on one side you have housing stock that was built at exactly the same time and for the same group of people, which were mostly like white, middle-class people. So on both sides, it’s the same housing stock historically. But then for the last 50 years, one side has been over 90% black and the other side has been over 90% white. This identical housing stock has then evolved through the maintenance decisions of people and the capacity of people to maintain their homes and their neighborhoods such that now, many of the neighborhoods on the black side of Kansas City are completely destitute.

There’s like lots of abandoned properties, lots of properties that have been removed. So you get this kind of widespread abandonment phenomena and coupled with that, then a lot of childhood asthma problems, childhood lead poisoning, all these kinds of social diseases that come from concentrated poverty. So I got curious about how this dynamic evolves and looking at how municipalities attempt to intervene in neighborhood change to create stable living environments and stable neighbor environments.

Some of my work then is around housing maintenance, neighborhood stability, and some of the work is then on local currencies and how cities can go about bringing the labor resources, which are in the community, there’s like lots of unemployment to bear on this question of safe and affordable housing for the neighborhood.

Scott Ferguson

Correct me if I’m wrong, this is a kind of institutional orientation or maybe even commitment of the UMKC (University of Missouri Kansas City) econ department or social science Ph.D. to the community and to the city. Right? There’s all kinds of local research that’s done by PhD students all the time. At least that’s my memory of when I visited years ago.

Ely Fair

I mean, yeah, absolutely. I mentioned things like concentrated lead poisoning or asthma, the only reason I know about them is because other PhD students have done epidemiology work on Kansas City, looking at how housing and poverty and disease are concentrated. There is a lot of work done like that in Kansas City.

The most recent study I did was looking at the way that your neighbors’ maintenance level – how your neighbor upkeeps their home, and how that affects your price. The reason I have data on maintenance level is that for 13 years UMKC sent grad students out to catalog external qualities of homes in Kansas City.

I think 250,000 parcels were observed with 15 different characteristics, so there’s this very rich data set on what these houses look like from the outside; both the houses themselves and the grounds and then the sidewalks and other kinds of municipal infrastructure, which then I was able to use to make these little micro markets and ask questions like, “when you’re in a neighborhood that is declining because people are not maintaining their homes how does that impact your own sale price?” Then if it brings down the price of your home, then that will also affect your likelihood of maintaining your home, right? Because when we maintain our homes, we get that money back when we sell the home. Right? But if all the houses are decreasing in price, then you can get this kind of group negative group dynamic in which one person under maintaining brings down your house price, which makes you under maintain, which brings down their house price, and you get progressive decline.

That’s the kind of thing that cities can intervene in and have a lot of legal authority to intervene in, but they have to figure it out. We as economists want to identify how those dynamics unfold so that we can inform urban planning.

Scott Ferguson

So you take a different approach to the problem than mainstream neoclassical economists typically would write, maybe you can walk us through how you do the way the approach works for the mainstream and what it is that you’re doing that’s different.

Ely Fair

The primary worldview that – what we call – “new urban economics” is working within is one that assumes that the housing market is going to be a perfect market. So there’s no transaction costs, there’s perfect information, perfect competition across the market and that would mean that the market should allocate resources correctly. The economic theory says if everyone knows everything, nothing costs anything, everything happens simultaneously, then you can have perfect allocation. If that’s true, then cities should not intervene either through zoning or through code enforcement, etc., etc., because if someone wants to purchase a poorly built house that’s cheaper, you should let them purchase that house. That’s a revealed preference of theirs to purchase a house that, for instance, has black mold in the walls,

So when the city says you can’t have black mold in your walls, the city is also saying that the consumer has to bear the cost and new urban economics would say that that’s unjustifiable, that the cost is unjustifiable. Of course, the problem in housing is a long-lived built-environment.

We can’t change it. We can’t move it around. We basically know nothing about houses as consumers, which is why we hire realtors and the transaction costs are really large, right? If you have a new neighbor that you don’t like, you don’t move out of your house. That’s not what happens. It’s hugely expensive to move and because of that, you can get areas of concentrated behavior. For instance, for my research, there are areas of concentrated under-maintenance where you have a group of people that either don’t want to but probably because of the money issue, just can’t maintain their homes like they would like to to keep them safe.

Because they can’t, they cause their neighborhood to progressively decline. So the other big change in how I’m looking at that compared to the mainstream is that mainstream economics tends to do what we call comparative statics, where you look at a snapshot of the the city and you say, “let’s assume that what’s happening in the city right now is what people want, and that price is correlated with desire today,” and then you take another snapshot in the future. The problem then is you can confuse current prices with past development. So it’s like, is your home expensive because you bought it because it’s next to a school? Or is there a school next to your home because your home was already expensive and you were already living in a nice neighborhood that the city wanted to invest in?

So if price and neighborhood investment are interrelated over time, then it doesn’t make sense for us to look at snapshots in time. We want to look at evolutionary processes and then for a city they want to figure out, “okay, is this evolution that’s happening in the neighborhood going to lead to a healthy, stable neighborhood or a neighborhood that is in some kind of decline that requires serious intervention,” and you want to identify it early enough at the right moment to pivot the social dynamics.

Scott Ferguson

Something that you brought up in our pre-recording conversation was something about the specificity of the United States in the ways that municipalities, and especially cities, are empowered to make all kinds of decisions, presumably because of our federalist structure, and how that really informs your work. Maybe you can speak to how a real appreciation for the law and legal history shapes the way you pose questions and how you respond to them.

Ely Fair

We have an interesting set up because municipalities are the ones primarily charged with determining how things are built – so codes – and where things are built – which is zoning – and also how things are maintained. How things are maintained has been traditionally done through building codes and now some cities are starting to break that off into its own kind of maintenance code space.

The actual structure of the cities is legally bound within the municipality, and they can take really extreme measures. On the one side, you can have zoning that says like, “nowhere in this city can there be an industrial park.” On the other side, you could be like, “Actually, you can put things wherever you want. It doesn’t matter if it’s next to a school, you can still build an oil refinery.” Right? So with regard to where things are placed, the city has extreme latitude. And also this applies to what is built. So, the city can say, “oh, this building can’t be more than four stories tall.” It can also say “there has to be a plug on every wall, every six feet.”

As they dictate what gets constructed, how it’s constructed, they also dictate the cost of construction, right? When the city says you can’t just build a shack in someone’s backyard and have someone live in it, they also say that  the cheapest housing that we could make and put over someone’s head is not legally allowed.

I think we actually see a lot of conflict around this right now with the rise of homelessness and encampments and the Supreme Court ruling saying that you’re allowed to displace people for being in public spaces means that there is actually this municipal conflict over whether or not cities should allow informal, uncoded and unzoned housing.

How permanent is that housing allowed to be? If you’ve been in California at all in the last 15 years, this is very pressing. One of the decisions that a lot of those municipalities have made is like, “we’ll allow you to be housed in informal ways that are not legal as long as it’s not very permanent.”

As long as we can come and tear it down every six weeks and you move to another place, that is fine. This kind of inhibits people from upgrading that informal housing. I don’t want to sound like I’m going to say there’s a good reason to chase people around from encampment to encampment. I think there’s good reason for municipalities to want to have laws that control what is built. Historically, the reason we have code enforcement is there were slums and the slums had slum fires, and people died. You were like, “oh, Chicago burned to the ground. We should probably have thought differently about where the houses were and how the houses were constructed.”

But over time, that has resulted in rising housing quality across the United States, but also rising housing burden as wages haven’t kept up with the quality increase in houses since the 1970s. So housing is increasing in quality, but still with these very concentrated pockets of low quality housing, called the ghettoization process.

Billy Saas

So maybe you can help us parse and account more clearly for the distinction between the kind of neoclassical, mainstream approach to these problems and the way that they observe the rise in homelessness on that side and propose (or don’t) solutions to that problem, with your own more heterodox, kind of institutionally backed, MMT-informed approach. How do they see it? What’s their solution? And, and I guess, in a word, why are they so wrong?

Ely Fair

I don’t want to make a puppet of large and diverse literature.

Billy Saas

We can be nuanced, but they’re wrong.

Ely Fair

Oh, I will make them a puppet. At the most extreme people with regard to homelessness, people will say, the reason we have homelessness is that we have refused to allow people to purchase homes of a quality that they can afford. We’ve done that by changing socially what we consider to be habitable homes. The warrant of habitability, which is like a legal doctrine that comes in the 60s, but it’s heavily debated in the 60s and 70s, it says, like, “municipalities can just tell you what is habitable.” When they set that bar, that becomes the legal bar within the municipality. So we have eliminated a lot of housing that I think we all would agree is not dignified for people living in such a wealthy society and a society in which we believe in, at least theoretically, some kind of intergenerational mobility. A person has a right to be born into a safe place, live in a safe place, it’s not going to make them sick, and that’s going to enable them to prosper as a human right. This is kind of the individualist democracy ideal. 

On the more – I would say – conservative neoclassical side, people would say, “look, poor people simply don’t have enough money. They should be allowed to live in the housing that they want to buy and can afford to buy and it should not be the role of the government to inhibit that housing.” I would say that we live in a weird techno dystopia. We are like science-fiction rich compared to 100 years ago. If we can’t figure out how to distribute resources in a way that people can live with what we would socially consider to be dignity, that’s a distributional problem.

That is a problem of lack of government intervention and not a problem of too much government intervention. I also think, yes, the city has broad power to call forth resources. If a city wants to have housing that we think is safe and stable, cities also have a lot of tools at their disposal to support communities in producing and maintaining that kind of housing and, right now, partly because of what economists have been telling them, that when they intervene in the market, they just mess everything up.

Cities have been wary of driving the direction of resource allocation within the municipality in order to create safe and stable housing. Part of that is being wary of making mistakes, recognizing that urban planning has made some pretty heavy mistakes in the past, and part of that is that they don’t have a lot of data-informed work coming out of econ about how: given the fact that cities are not currency issuers in general, how do they use relatively limited financial resources to make pretty hard decisions about how to create community stability?

I think that’s the work of economists. That’s that stuff we should be telling them. We should say, “oh, we evaluated this policy, we evaluated this neighborhood change. It turns out if ten years ago, the municipality had come in and supported this community in these ways, then we would expect to see a very different outcome now.” Some kind of like an evolutionary outlook on the city.

Scott Ferguson

So how would the worst caricature of the worst conservative neoclassical urban economists explain the Chicago Fire? Is that just an externality? Is it an act of God? Is it a market correction? How does that get explained away?

Ely Fair

I mean, if you say the market would work if we had perfect information, zero transaction costs, perfect liquidity, etc., then if you have a market failure, it’s one of those problems. One of those things didn’t happen. So it becomes the role of the state to probably create better information. So then the state makes the market work better by recognizing that people have imperfect information and providing more perfect information.

This is like the kind of mainstream argument for something like the FDA. It’s not that they should regulate the thing, they shouldn’t regulate what the food is, but they should tell us what the food is so that people don’t lie to us about what’s in the food anymore. The market was lying to us about what was in the food, and we had all these market failures.

For instance, with the fire in New York City just a few years ago that killed a bunch of immigrants because the fire doors weren’t maintained properly. You could get two solutions. You could say that was a risk and these people dying was within the distribution of risk that they accepted and that’s what they paid for. They paid for this distribution of risk. Or you could say they weren’t aware of the true distribution of risk, so the role of the city shouldn’t have been to enforce the codes around fire safety. It should have been to more effectively inform those people about the true distribution of risk, so that they could either pay more money to get the fire doors fixed, or or accept the potential risk that they took on in regards to their families dying.

It’s rarely stated so callously. One thing that I found quite appalling when I first got into urban econ is a pretty consistent finding that black women heads of households in the United States do not prefer to purchase as much housing as their white counterparts. So after controlling for income, you still find that black female heads of households do not purchase as high quality of housing as their white counterparts. If you can’t say, “oh, what we found was some kind of structural racism,” then you have to say, “oh, there is some kind of cultural feature in which it turns out that black mothers just don’t care as much about the quality of housing that they put their children in as white mothers,” which to me doesn’t pass the smell test at all.

If you have a study that finds that, what you say is, “oh, I have found some kind of structural racism.” It is obviously untrue that any group of mothers cares less about their children than any other group of mothers, right? That’s obviously untrue. I must have found some kind of other problem.

But, the mainstream can’t really accept that it in its most extreme forms anyways.

Scott Ferguson

Right? So they default to this kind of Moynihan culture of poverty.

Ely Fair

Yeah. You’re just like, “well, we have “black” as a control signifier. It shows less purchasing for housing. We have discovered some kind of cultural feature right.” The cultural feature, for whatever reason, is that black mothers just don’t prioritize safe housing in the same way that white mothers do.

And I’m like, “that’s that sounds like a weird racist thing to say.” If you just said it to someone at a grocery store, you might get slapped, right? 

Scott Ferguson

That’s why you put it in an econ journal.

Ely Fair

For me, it is quite clear in Kansas City – this is true of much of the United States – but Kansas City has highly segregated housing. That the neighborhood-decline there is not about not really caring about having your yard not have trash in it or not really caring about whether you have gutters on your house. It’s a manifestation of a concentration of poverty, which we know creates all kinds of social diseases. It is also just like a lack of income. 

I’ve had this pushback from other economists, “why study under maintained housing? Isn’t it clear that what people need is better paying jobs? So shouldn’t we just be talking about the labor market?” I think there’s legitimacy to that. On the other side, I think that we could use the power of municipalities to activate our communities to make a safer housing environment that was more stable without also needing to figure out how to get people better paying jobs.

We can put more than one pan on the fire, maybe, right?

Scott Ferguson

Yeah, yeah. So maybe before we get into some of your policy proposals, your potential solutions, maybe we can get a little snapshot of just some of the more fine grained findings that came out of these evolutionary housing studies at this really intensely micro level.What did you learn? What are the tendencies, at least in the areas that you studied from this data set from UMKC.

Ely Fair

In Kansas City’s core, I use street level observation of homes. So we have 250,000 of these parcels that have been observed and sales from 2010 to 2020. Okay, can we predict the sale price of your home just looking at the kind of micro market of the maintenance around your home?

When someone’s looking to buy your house and you walk out the front door and you’re like, I like this house and you look out at the neighborhood, what is the neighborhood that you see? So let’s call that the micro market of the house. How does people’s visual perception of the upkeep of that neighborhood affect the price?

I took a little sliver of the front of every parcel that was sold, and I made a little bubble. I basically included your micro market as all of the homes that are within 60ft of the front door of your house. What I found in Kansas City was that, after controlling through your own quality of your home, that just that feature explains or predicts, let’s say, because this is actually what the statistics are doing, predicts about 20% of the price of your home.

Not knowing anything else about the features of your home, just how well-maintained your neighbors are, after accounting for your own maintenance, accounts for about 20%. If we think of this as like a common pool resource problem, like, tragedy of the commons, I don’t know how to say this right. If my neighbor’s maintenance brings down my price, then I’m going to tend to also bring down my maintenance level, because when you’re looking to sell your home and you think maybe I’ll renovate my kitchen, it’s going to cost me $25,000, and you think I could get that $25,000 back when I sell the house. The house is going to be worth $25,000 more, right?

Then you renovate your kitchen and then the house is upkept. Or you repaint the house. Right? If the house is in a market that is compressed and you’re on the low end of the market, you’re not going to get $25,000 out of the house. In Kansas City, it’s becoming more expensive, but you can buy a house for $50,000, which means that renovating the kitchen is only going to give you a couple thousand dollars.

You’re never going to just add $25,000 to the house. The house is only worth $50,000. In that market, no one’s going to renovate their kitchens because you can’t get the money back. So as that price comes down, your return on maintenance comes down and so if my neighbors decrease my price by 20%, then – if we think it’s linear – I decrease my maintenance level by 20%. That in turn decreases their price, that decreases their maintenance level. It just comes back and forth. Then we have a situation in which the individual decision to under maintain is actually harming your neighbors, and that is in turn causing them to make individual decisions that harm you. So if we take an atomized view of the world – which is what the mainstream within economics would do, each individual is making their rational decision – you still get downward dynamics in which the neighborhood falls apart. This is some of the work I’m doing right now, one of the things that the city wants to kind of figure out is like, “okay, we figured out that under maintenance at the municipal level at these micro market levels is causing neighborhood decline.”

How does the city intervene? Does the city make some kind of rotating fund that helps people invest that stops that process? Then you still need to figure out when the process is about to start. You need to figure out how much that rotating fund would need to be. And this is an idea I think is underused and potentially powerful. Cities can give you $25,000 to fix your house and be like, “give me the $25,000 back when you sell your house right.”

The primary method we’ve used for helping neighborhoods maintain is usually through HUD grants. They’ll target a neighborhood, and they provide micro grants for maintenance. If you’re a homeowner, you can get a little bit of money. The problem is the money does not seem to be enough. The density of investment does not seem to be enough.

So if you offer someone $5,000 you can’t paint your house for $5,000. So if I was in a situation where I didn’t have the money to reroof my house, $5,000 isn’t going to do it. I need most of the money to reroof my house, or maybe all of it.

A municipality then runs into this problem. Are they paying for that with US dollars? If they are, they need to get those US dollars from somewhere. How do they get those resources? Right now, most of that money is coming from the federal government through block grants. It’s just simply not dense enough.

So this is kind of some of the work I want to look at next. How do we identify these downward spirals? How do we identify these tipping points when neighborhoods start to decline? How much maintenance investment support do we need to stop the decline such that the process of decline just never happens and the homes maintain their value? The black-white wealth gap in the United States is 20 to 1, so white families have about 20 times the wealth of black families. It is much larger than the income gap. Part of that is because of the history of racialized neighborhoods and the fact that black concentrated neighborhoods are perceived as declining in value.

Because of the income gap, they are also more likely to be under maintained and to end up in a situation in which you have under maintenance -> under priced -> under maintenance -> under priced cycle, then there are a lot of black families that own homes, but those homes do not appreciate at the same rate as the average white home.

This is where the wealth gap has been created. We concentrated poverty and we concentrated black communities and then those homes slowly depreciated in value, while white homes appreciated. If we want to reverse that kind of process, we want to figure out how to stop the neighborhood from declining in the first place.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah, I assume that there’s all kinds of factors that we have already talked about, unemployment and underemployment, which of course disproportionately affects black communities. But also, I would imagine banking and financial instruments like home equity loans impact it as well. If you’re if you’re making very little because you’re unemployed or underemployed or just…

Ely Fair

…or intermittent unemployed, right?

Scott Ferguson

Right. When you don’t have financial security, I’m assuming a bank isn’t going to give you a home equity loan.

Ely Fair

We do have an income gap. A white-black income gap has been persistent, but the income gap is not nearly as large as the wealth gap. Because wealth in the United States is predominantly houses, that’s the channel to target.

Whether it’s under banking, whether it’s downward maintenance price dynamics, whether it’s some kind of crowding effect, housing is the wealth that’s being lost. There is an ownership gap too between white and black families, but it’s not, at least in Kansas City, as dramatic as one would think, considering how dramatic the wealth gap is.

It’s about the homes that black families end up owning and what their appreciation is compared to white families. 

Scott Ferguson

Yeah. This is Sandy Darity’s point, all the time

Ely Fair

All the time. Right. Yeah.

Scott Ferguson

You’ve already begun to broach the topic, but concerning some of the mixed policy responses, what are some of the challenges of coming up with active public policy at the municipal level to treat these issues?

And then all of this is teeing up what we really want to talk about as well which is your work on complementary currencies, where they fit in in your work and and the legal history that you’ve done around that. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. So let’s start with the housing policies themselves.

Ely Fair

Yeah. I mean, it’s difficult for cities because maintenance is a cost. So, when you force certain kinds of outcomes at the neighborhood level, you create expense. One of the things that’s interesting about code enforcement is the legal space is huge, so no city enforces the codes that are on the books because it would be too burdensome.

It’s recognized as being a burden. The city could come into your house right now and be like, “oh, it turns out, since this house was built, we change these codes, so all of this stuff has to happen.” Because they know that, what cities have done is try to train code enforcers to employ a lot of discretion and latitude to assess the likely ability of the person to pay and then ask for some kind of mitigation based on the ability to pay, which, as near as I can tell, has not been abused as much as we might expect.

I’m always very suspicious of someone who is essentially a cop being told, like, “we know that you could do anything you want, just decide what’s best.” Chicago started doing a thing where they used code enforcers to evict homes that the police department doesn’t like, because the code enforcer can knock on your door and come in, whereas the police cannot.

It’s not considered a search by the courts. Cities could do everything. The question is, “What do you do?” How do you facilitate a situation in which you get people into a position where they can actually help themselves stabilize their own housing? And so you have a couple of problems.

One is obviously, landlords are in a really different position than owner occupiers. A thing that Kansas City has done, which I think is smart, is they started making landlords pay a fee every year. I think it’s $45 right now to register the rental. That money pays for randomized code enforcement checks that just happen because one of the problems in rental properties is if I call and I say, like, “my toilet’s leaking black water into the basement,” the city will come and inspect it and be like, “this is not habitable. This must be fixed.” 

My landlord knows it was me. There’s no denying it. No one else knew that my toilet was leaking into the basement except for me. So then you get either rent hikes or eviction, right? So there’s a lot of danger for poor tenants. So one thing cities are trying to do is make a mix where you may be enforced differently on different kinds of people, whether they’re a tenant or a landlord or owner occupier. 

Also different municipalities are treating code enforcement really differently depending on what they think the problem is, which is part of the work I’ve been trying to intervene in. So in Miriam, Kansas – a suburb of Kansas City –  if your house needs a new roof, they put a sign in your front yard that says, we’re going to fix this roof in two weeks. We’re going to pay someone to do it and then they put that onto your tax bill. If you don’t pay your tax bill in three years, they seize your home and they sell it at a tax auction. That’s what happens when you don’t pay your taxes. They seize your home and they sell it at a tax auction.

So the logic there is coming directly out of the econ literature. It says, “if the home is worth maintaining, then the market would allocate the home to someone who is willing to pay the price of the home, plus the maintenance. If the home is currently occupied by someone who is not willing to pay the price plus the maintenance, it should be reallocated.”

So then it must be some kind of a market failure, right? The person is unwilling to move out of the home to sell the home and move into something that’s affordable to them. It’s an evaluation of what the problem is, which I don’t think is very accurate to what the problem actually is.

My work and the work of urban studies and urban economists then is to be like, “how do we evaluate this really complicated market in order to understand what the problems are so that you can provide solutions?” This is entirely speculative, one of the problems I think that we saw in places like Kansas City is: the white flight happened in the 60s and 70s, right?

We had industrial working class, middle class families. Black families get access to neighborhoods in Kansas City that they previously didn’t have access to and buy into these very nice homes. The housing stock is beautiful. It was built around the turn of the century. There’s a lot of very nice housing stock.

They bought into these homes and they never probably really had money to pay someone for maintenance. But it didn’t really matter because they had a family unit that could provide maintenance for themselves. You have people get on their ladder and clean their gutters. They’re not ever probably paying someone to do that.

So you roll forward. They’re in their 40s. When this happens, you roll forward 40 years. They’re all in their 70s and 80s. They can’t get on a ladder. And then ten years after that, you’re like, “oh, well, these gutters haven’t been cleaned, which means your siding is rotting and your house needs to be condemned.” If the city had seen that transition of labor, that the labor being provided by the family towards support of the unit was no longer able to be provided at that time, they probably, for not very much money, could have actually intervened and been like, “all you really need is some kid that needs a little bit of work to come by and get on a ladder for you because you can’t do it anymore. It’s not safe.” But if you think that the market’s going to just reallocate those homes, you don’t make that intervention. And if you think like, “oh, actually, housing is a social good, it’s pretty complicated how and why it gets maintained and how and why it looks the way it does,” then you try to make community based solutions to provide those labor resources. 

Scott Ferguson

So what are some of those that you have thought through that you would advocate.

Ely Fair

One of the things that’s interesting about housing is, in general, most of the cost is labor, and the materials are reasonably cheap and most of the skills are reasonably easy to acquire compared to lots of other kinds of things.

Compared to even just fixing your car, it’s like, “oh, it’s actually just easier to fix your leaking sink.” It takes 20 minutes on a YouTube channel and you save yourself a couple hundred dollars, you know. So, one thing I would like to see in a city like Kansas City doing something where they say, “okay, we’re going to rent this warehouse and we’re going to buy basic housing supplies like sheetrock and studs and whatever, and have a tool library and if you want to come in, we will, teach you to do the basic kind of repair that you need to do. And then you can get permission to rent tools and to purchase materials from us at cost.” It’s really expensive to have someone come in and reseat your toilet when it starts leaking into your basement.

It costs more than the toilet, but it’s actually pretty straightforward. In the neighborhoods that are under maintained, we also have a ton of slack labor. This is one of the paradoxes of capitalism. The places that there’s the most to do, there’s the most underutilized labor. Is it possible for not that much money to upskill this community such that they can actually provide these services for themselves?

I think the answer is probably yes. All of those families in their 70s and 80s have some niece or nephew or some friend of another family who could definitely have done that work if the person just had a 30ft ladder or was able to go to a class and learn how to reseat a toilet.

So I think that those are the kinds of solutions, in part because cities are so cash strapped. Maybe this is an opportunity to think about complementary currencies, but cities could also incentivize this kind of work.

Scott Ferguson

You can imagine a municipal job guarantee or at least public works program where you’re expanding this so that it’s not just about a pooled set of resources and a pedagogical center, but the city’s paying people to go out and do this work at a living wage for little to no money.

Ely Fair

There is a lot of legal space for municipal complementary currencies that are tax driven. Interestingly, they’re very rare. Municipal currencies used to be less uncommon. Tax driven ones, I don’t know of any example, actually. Which is a little unfortunate.

It does, of course, get complicated because a lot of the designs that I tend to be more reluctant or skeptical about would be able to allocate a lot of resources, part of how they do that is they make a complementary currency that’s tax driven through taxes that are already being collected by the city.

And because cities are always so cash strapped, it becomes really dangerous for the city. So municipalities tend to be quite risk averse about this because; one, the city really doesn’t want to end up in a constitutional battle. They’re not trying to go to the Supreme Court to say like,” oh, this is not widely distributed enough to be considered competitive with the US dollar,” like all of these weird legal rulings we’ve had. So they have to be avoidant of that. They have to make sure that the currency is clearly, for the purposes of the federal government, not competitive with the U.S. dollar. But they also, they can’t do anything with the currency when they bring it in as taxes. But they do stuff with U.S. dollars when they bring them in as taxes. They spend them as US dollars. But when they bring back the currency that they spend, that is their local funny money, it doesn’t provide anything to them. It’s hard to figure out a good design that really – and I know you all have been working on this, and thinking about it a lot in places like New York City – can provide an increased labor pool that’s far short of a job guarantee that also doesn’t necessarily put the city at risk. 

So, like in my municipal currency paper, one of the things I propose is some kind of direct labor tax rate. I’m from Lawrence, Kansas. I was working on trying to convince some people in Lawrence to do this, and it turns out everything is always complicated. In Kansas, taxes have to be approved by the state. So the city can’t issue a thing called a tax, but also taxes are collected by the county. I actually got the county to agree to accept the local currency in taxes. He was like, “I don’t know why we wouldn’t, I guess, but it’s weird, you know?” But maybe something could be designed where it’s not called a tax, and then maybe the state wouldn’t care.

Scott Ferguson

That’s actually one of the things, thinking about this, theorizing it, writing about it, talking to people about it, even trying to consult and advise leaders about it, so much of it is about language.

Ely Fair

Yeah, you’re a rhetoric person, right?

Scott Ferguson

You can call it one thing in one meeting and it doesn’t go over well and you switch it to another thing, another term and then somehow it’s fine. I just wanted to add that in there.

Ely Fair

Yeah, yeah. Complimentary is potentially very powerful, actually, because one of the things that the courts have been very clear on in the history of, what I would call, nonfederal currencies, is that they cannot compete with the US dollar. So, the contracts clause of the Constitution, they’re like, “no, no competition with the US dollar.”

So there’s actually an interesting recent case in which an Austrian economist, internet guy was like, “the US dollar is not real. It is not backed by anything. It is fake money. This is why we always see inflation. What we need is a real currency that we can really transact in.” He started printing gold coins for the explicit purpose of creating an exchangeable commodity that would replace the US dollar. The circulation was basically non-existent. He is in jail. He was arrested by the FBI. They were like, “this is not acceptable.” The big thing wasn’t that they were made out of gold, that they look like the US dollar or anything. It was just that he was saying the point is to replace the U.S. dollar and they are not into it.

Interestingly, the courts have been very accepting of nonfederal currencies that are not designed to circulate broadly, usually defined as specific geographies or specific commodity targets. So like, if, for instance, New York City issued a currency that was pegged to the MTA rideshare where you’re just like, “one of these is worth a rideshare.”

That probably would be totally fine because how they’re conceiving of what money is something that’s universally convertible across any amount of space. The monetary theory in the courts is often a little weird sometimes. A thing that was a problem is subdivisions of the currency, so currencies that have not been subdivided for the purpose of wide circulation or for easy use. But this is a strange thing now because you use digital wallets, they’re infinitely subdivided. Missouri got into a bunch of trouble because they issued a currency that was tax driven. You could pay taxes with it. You could pay ferry rides, you could buy salt from the state with it.

They also paid state workers with it. They also gave micro loans or startup loans for businesses with it. One of the big problems for the Supreme Court was that the currency was denominated like the US dollar, so that it was easy to use in day to day interactions and they were like, “no, this is designed to be current. Currently this currency is designed to be current. It is intended for everyday use.” So probably you could avoid these kinds of problems if you’re like “oh no, it’s only a digital wallet. It’s just a digital protocol. It’s only good in New York City or it’s only pegged to an hour of labor or something.” The thing I was trying to work on in Lawrence and, ultimately, got sidetracked with grad school was to say, “okay, everyone over 16 who lives in town owes the city ten hours of labor a year.” The city will set a sale price on these things. So if you want to buy one from the city, you can buy one from the city at $20. Okay. Then you set a maximum exchange rate with the US dollar, but you don’t defend a minimum, because if the city agrees to buy these things for U.S. dollars, then it puts itself at some kind of risk, right?

It has to defend the exchange rate. So you’re just like, “no, I’m only going to defend one side of the exchange rate because I can always provide these for you if you want to give me $20.” This means that the currency couldn’t accidentally explode. It’s going to float somewhere below $20, and then you just provide these things to nonprofit services. If you wanted to do something like a housing renovation project, then you could be like, “oh, it turns out, actually there’s already nonprofits in Lawrence working on this stuff, right? There’s already Habitat for Humanity.” Then a person could call Habitat and be like, “hey, I have this problem in my home, and I fall within some kind of means test or whatever,” and people come over from, you know, any random person comes over who’s been trained to do the work or a little team and they do the work and they get their currency and then the currency is just taxed away. If someone wants to work for Habitat for Humanity all the time, then the city can just facilitate an exchange.

The person knows that they might get paid up to $20 an hour for this work because someone else is going to not work for the city and is going to need it to pay the tax, but that it’s going to float somewhere underneath there. Then the city could target the low end and say like, “oh, we’ll never issue more than this many so that we try to float it near $20 an hour.”

What you’re going to get then is wealth redistribution from people that don’t want to work for the city towards people who want to work, and you’re going to increase the labor utilization. So it’s not a job guarantee, but it is a job guarantee-light in a way that could meet some pretty targeted labor distribution goals.

It becomes, I think, more difficult if you want to utilize all of the slack labor. How do you tax away all of the slack labor without putting the city at some kind of exchange rate risk?

Billy Saas

Can we just do a quick sidebar on the constraints, the legal constraints on complementary community currencies? It’s fascinating to hear about the cases that you shared. I wondered if you could maybe help us better understand through an example of a case, maybe the weird Austrian guy with the gold coins is case enough, but it seems to me very clear that there are – in the space of cryptocurrencies – several pretenders to the throne who would very much like to and have avowedly, I guess in different ways, said that they aspire to become something to rival or displace bank money, which is US dollars. How, if these smaller municipal cases are litigated at the highest level, how is it the case or how could it be the case that things like Bitcoin, Ethereum and all the rest are permitted to continue to exist and flourish?

Ely Fair

Yeah. I mean, with regard to cryptocurrencies, they were categorized as commodities by the federal government. Once they’re a commodity then it’s just like trading any other financial commodity. They might say that they intend to be current and they tend to circulate as money: they don’t. I think the government has not felt like that was potentially threatening. I don’t think that there is a case, not that I know of any legal cases, in which any federal government has been like, “this thing is not an illegal kind of taking of our power.”

Scott Ferguson

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like the opposite has happened. This is what the whole turn to stablecoins has been about, if I understand correctly, which is about fully integrating these speculative assets into the banking system and now we have President Shit Coin and Chief who is all about it, so there’s no competition at all.

Ely Fair

It’s not clear what the difference is between what a stablecoin is and a contemporary bank deposit, except that the bank deposit is a stablecoin issued by the bank and therefore regulated within the banking system as a depository institution and the stablecoin is issued by some programmer somewhere. If it is pegged to the dollar, if it exchanges to the dollar, unless you start accepting that for debts owed to the government, unless you start accepting that for taxes, it can’t replace the dollar, it operates through the dollar.

Scott Ferguson

I think there are some states who are accepting crypto through taxes.

Ely Fair

In the United States?

Scott Ferguson

I think so?

Ely Fair

I know some foreign governments have done that. We could go off on the weird things people are trying to do with crypto. I do think that those technologies could be very useful for producing tax driven local complementary currencies because they enable secondary exchange.

It is cheap and, technically, rather simple for a city to be like, “everyone in this city will have an account on this simple ledger protocol, and that means you can log in to the website, which is hosted at Coinbase or something and sell and buy our local currency and when we issue it, we issue it to your wallet and when we tax it, we just tax it from your wallet.” Because those protocols exist, they make some exciting space for local currencies because one of the problems has been that local currencies are cumbersome. People don’t really like operating in multiple currencies, particularly if they’re not exactly equivalent. But if your local currency is pegged to the dollar, who’s defending the exchange rate? Right. Does the city take on that and is willing to buy the local currency for US dollars? In Lawrence, we had a non-tax driven currency for a while, when I was growing up. It was annoying. Is this other money? It was 1 to 1 with the dollar but it’s like a different bill. You got to put it somewhere different.

Billy Saas

It’s one more thing to think about.

Ely Fair

You have to put it somewhere different in the register. People took it, but they didn’t really want to take it. One of the advantages of some of the open source work that happened with the Bristol Pound, and that is it’s an interesting case because the Bristol pound went digital and then died.

But I think that they were on to something there. Credit card transaction fees cost 3.5%. There are open source versions of those protocols. You could have a debit card that quite easily had two accounts in it. You go to Europe, you swipe your card, they’re like, “do you want to pay in euros or dollars?” They just click the button and there’s just a conversion.

Scott Ferguson

South America, too.

Ely Fair

Those digital technologies could enable a local currency to defend an exchange rate. You can be like, these are 1 to 1 but when you take U.S. dollars from the debit card, we charge you the 3.5% fee. When you take the local currency, we don’t. There’s an incentive for the business to take the local currency that doesn’t require income and actually maybe produces income for the local currency, because then the local currency gets these 3.5% fees, then they can actually buy these things back maybe sometimes.

So I think there’s a lot of interesting opportunities there.

Scott Ferguson

I guess I just want to highlight a meta point here, which is that there’s not just one kind of complimentary currency and even what you call it, is it a parallel currency is, is it just another form of credit that’s regional, right? What we call it, how we design it, what its material features are, what its functionality is?

All these things are up for grabs. You know this. I’m just saying this for our listeners. It’s totally a design problem. It’s going to be unique in different situations.

Ely Fair

And to get back then to Billy’s question about some of these legal cases, how do they get to the Supreme Court about what’s happened? I think we can illustrate some of this thing that you’re saying, Scott, about design problems is like, so with the Articles of Confederation, right? The first government of the United States, states issued their own currency.

One of the great failings of the Articles of Confederation was that states were issuing their own currencies, they were competing with exchange rates, and they were competing with trade. They were doing things like beggar thy neighbor policies to attack each other around currency exchange rates. So one of the first things in the Constitution, in article four, I think, is a clause.

It actually says states may not issue debt instruments at all. This is weird because they immediately decided that states need to issue bonds, but the contract clause then has been, over the course of time, litigated to mean that less-than federal entities may not issue currencies designed to monies designed to compete with the federal money.

For instance, like I mentioned earlier, the Missouri case, there’s other states that also issued currencies in the 1800s that were deemed legal because they were chunky. So I think Kentucky did one where it was like only $500,000 bills, basically. Because they could only be used for very specialized transactions without some kind of secondary instrument, the courts deemed that they weren’t competitive. But in the 1800s, there were a lot of problems with this in the United States because a lot of places didn’t have sufficient currency in circulation from the US government. Banks issued their own paper money that were good on deposits. This is part of what the Federal Reserve actually comes about to try to solve, that is banks were issuing all this paper money good on deposits. But then how does one bank know to accept another bank’s money? And will they actually accept it or not?

Scott Ferguson

And at what rate?

Ely Fair

That was the kind of the preponderance of money in the 1800s, there was like a lot of this.

One thing that the federal government did when they decided they didn’t want any more bank money, the courts decided that the contract clause did not apply to non governmental entities in general. So, if the bank is part of the state, the bank can’t issue money that looks like federal money.

If the bank is not part of the state, it was allowed to. So even the Bank of Arkansas, which was wholly owned by Arkansas, was allowed to issue currency that basically looked like the federal dollar was pegged to the US dollar because they weren’t part of the state of Arkansas. There’s a Supreme Court case about that. Some really weird little differentiations.

But, one thing that is interesting is that the federal government basically taxed away bank issued currency by passing a law that made it so that there was a fee every time the thing was issued. So every time the bank put it back out, they had to pay a fee, which made it so that they couldn’t defend their own money as being worth the same amount as the US dollar.

That law expired in the 60s or 70s. At the time, someone at the Treasury Department was like, “it doesn’t really matter that it’s expired because it would be illegal for banks to do this anyways.” It’s not actually clear that it would be. There is no law that would make it so a bank could not just start issuing paper money again. The way that we got all of that out of circulation is gone. So, the municipality could then work with a local bank to issue a complementary currency and actually maybe kind of shield itself. Then these design questions become really important in the courts for whatever reason.

If it looks like the US dollar, they don’t like it. If it’s called a dollar, they don’t really like it. If it says like “this thing is good for services provided within Manhattan,” they’re like, “this is cool. This is fine.” Services are not the same thing. There are these weird technical design problems that I think make no sense, but for whatever reason, in the past, the courts decided made a lot of sense. These days there’s not that much litigation around it because complementary currencies aren’t that common anymore. But all through the 1800s into the early 1900s, both bank money and state and local money were quite common and so determining the space for them was really important in the courts.

Billy Saas

Well, it seems like one easy trick would be to present your community currency or complementary currency as a commodity and you’re good to go.

Ely Fair

Yeah. Or exchangeable commodities. There’s a court ruling that says that something is not money because it is exchangeable only explicitly for commodities.

Billy Saas

So, paradoxically, tax driven chartalist but also barter forward.

Ely Fair

Yeah. In company towns where the currency would be almost exclusively issued by the company and goods or goods at the company store, those have all been deemed legal, right? Because they’re only good for goods and not for, I don’t know, the other thing that we do with money as a debt instrument.

For us, it’s money. It’s the same. But, in the past, that wasn’t deemed to be the case.

Scott Ferguson

Some municipalities and states took company scrip as taxes, which is wild, right? 

Ely Fair

Totally. So I mean, they were current. They were exchangeable. They were used in everyday transactions to keep track of debt. But for whatever reason, the courts have been interesting about it. So one thing we issued after the war, there was a brief period when there was some military money issued that was good on train rides.

It was just issued as part of a payment to military personnel. You got paid in train rides.

Scott Ferguson

We could call those vouchers and then are they a currency? There are functional differences. There are. Of course there are. And there are design differences. But I also think that moneyness is a multifaceted thing. At what point is one system a set of debt instruments and at what point is it a voucher system? Anyway, I interrupted you. Go ahead.

Ely Fair

No, no it’s fine. I think for us, then of course in our thinking about how to design things, we want to think about what latent resources or underutilized things, whether it’s labor, or is it seats on the metro that are like underutilized that we could we could push utilization through some kind of tax driven currency and then we have to be careful because, yeah, municipalities are relatively weak compared to the federal government.

They can’t afford really expensive mistakes. I think this is part of the trick for us as people that are thinking about this and talking to municipal governments about it is like, is there an easy stage to kind of structure something that is easy to buy into, relatively cheap to begin, logical.

This is part of the thing I really liked about the idea of some kind of community service. Everyone knows what a community service hour is. You could just hand someone a piece of paper that says Community Service Hour on it. They’re like, “I know what this is.” It presents very little risk for the city because that is a new tax.

You wouldn’t even have to call it a tax, right? People wouldn’t necessarily even think that it is a tax. You could just say everyone in the town’s required to do ten hours of service for a year.

Scott Ferguson

Social responsibility – which is – what is a tax?

Ely Fair

Right. Social responsibility. That design is really convenient in that it doesn’t present a lot of threat to the municipality. It is potentially inconvenient in that it may not be very scalable. You may not get to a point where you’re like, by not defending a stable exchange rate the bill will probably never be circulated as a money instrument, because it’s not clear what it’s worth compared to the US dollar. If you peg an exchange rate, you can get a lot more circulation of the money, but in some way you have to defend your exchange rate. So you take on exchange rate risk.

So it’s like, hopefully we would be coming up with clever little designs where we’re like, “oh, there’s like a little toy version of this. It’s easy for a city to do and cheap and kind of understandable,” that then if it works, we can kind of progressively take on other features that would enable more resource utilization.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I’ve been talking to Jakob Feinig a lot about is, using the multiple understood crediting system in our public education system. That might be a way of mobilizing labor and community service from very young and have it just be part of a kind of civic pedagogy and participation so that could be one thing. I want to bring up one more thing as long as we’re just kind of, I don’t know, this is really cool. This feels like a seminar, right? Like this isn’t like our usual interviews where we’re – okay. I’m enjoying this. So on the one hand, it seems like there’s an imperative to design, in multiple senses, semantically, rhetorically, legally, technically, technically, materially to design systems that are maximally legible to the public, which means that they have to somehow resemble or plug into the US dollar psychologically, ideologically with relative ease. Yet at the same time, you have to cover your ass legally and know the history of the law and realize there are certain buzzwords or certain design choices you have to avoid.

It seems like the trick is to somehow go maximally in both directions at once and find the right mixture. But, you know, I think about things all the time, this is more like when my kids are in elementary school, but when my kids are in elementary school, it’s the holiday season and it’s time to get their teachers some little gift.

And it’s like, stop at Starbucks on the way to school and you pick up a $10 or a $20 Starbucks gift card. Right? And nobody thinks twice about that. Right? It’s this massive complimentary currency or whatever we want to call it, that is narrowly receivable and yet widely receivable, because there’s Starbucks all around the country, if not the world.

You’re locking in your liquidity, right? You’re restricting your liquidity and it’s not denominated in like, this is 7.3 Starbucks. There’s not weird denominations and we don’t even call it something else. We just say it’s $20 in Starbucks. The amount of psychosocial, ideological machinery that goes into just making that feel smooth is fascinating to me and I kind of want to conjure that ethos in designing a public currency that is not just feeding a multinational corporation.

Ely Fair

Totally. Like I was saying earlier about the community service hours scheme, one of the things I really like about it is it creates wealth redistribution from people that don’t want to work towards people that do, but how that happens is you allow the currency to float, right? It sacrifices this other thing.

Another thing, when I was working with some folks in Lawrence is, do we peg this thing instead to like bus rides.” Our buses are highly underutilized, right? The city’s constantly like, “should they be free for people that need them?” 

Scott Ferguson

They’re spending money on advertising campaigns.

Ely Fair

If you make the bus ride a known conversion. You’re like, “oh, a bus ride is a dollar,” then when I buy bus rides then you’re like, “I work for bus rides.” Theoretically, more people would take bus rides because they’re like, “well, I have all these bus rides on this weird card.”

You could probably exchange them sometimes too. Maybe not as much as we might want because it’s not just a dollar.With the Starbucks dollars, it’s the same. If you went to sell your $20 gift card. What would you get for it? Not 20 bucks. I know you can’t sell SNAP, but when you sell SNAP, you don’t get par. Starbucks will not defend the exchange rate. They will only sell the thing at the exchange rate. We kind of want the city to defend the exchange rate in order to make it really work.

But it’s tricky to figure out how to actually have them do that. One thing I was thinking about, also in Lawrence, there’s a pretty strong downtown community or downtown business association. The Downtown Business Association would do gift cards that would be good within the Downtown Business Association area. They could deal with distributing the US dollars later among the group of them, and they could probably actually sell those at a discount, knowing that the money is held right.

They could drive people into kind of a local currency scheme being like, okay, you give us 90 bucks, we’ll give you $100 worth of downtown credit, basically. Then that downtown credit becomes widely used within the downtown area. It drives local economic development and you get some discount, but then you only get one aspect of the policy, then you get more local economic development and you’re like, “oh, that’s cool,” but you don’t get labor utilization.

Scott Ferguson

Ben Wilson has been really big on property taxes. I don’t know if you have thoughts about that. Then there’s a demand at the level of landlords, right.

They need this local currency to meet their tax obligation and it can be structured in lots of ways as we’ve been saying. It could be a discount on your extant tax bill or it could be in excess. Not on this proposal, but in your labor hours proposal, you’re suggesting not a discount because that creates the so-called dollar drain, instead, it’s an additional obligation.

Ely Fair

That’s the danger, that you create a dollar drain, you create a liability. The city doesn’t want their funny money. They have no need for it.

Scott Ferguson

If you don’t do a discount, if you do an additional obligation. I mean, you know, that’s politics.

Ely Fair

Totally. And then it’s a question of, do you defend the exchange rate? What resources are you hoping to utilize? And how do you make it feel fair and equitable? You could, for instance, have the tax, like I was saying in Kansas City, there’s a fee for being a landlord that they use to do these maintenance checks.

You could also have a fee on landlords. You could be like, “landlords, you have to accept some of these Ithaca Hours.” Maybe you tax everybody in Ithaca Hours, and then you say, like, “everyone needs to give us ten Ithaca Hours a year, but for being a landlord, you have to give us another ten and if your tenant is unable to find work at the rate, they could always work for the city to pay you this thing which you will accept in exchange for rent, because it’s as good as rent to you.” Right? How do you drive it? It’s tricky. I think part of it is an imagination problem.

Scott Ferguson

Nobody’s on this beat. Yeah.

Ely Fair

We’re not accustomed. And it’s interesting because, when you look at the history of it, people in the United States were quite accustomed.

Scott Ferguson

I mean, that’s what Jacob Feinig’s book is all about. Yeah.

Ely Fair

Every term I take my intro macro students to our archives at Knox College and we look at all this old money. We have a lot of cool, old money, we have Cuneiform tablets and Roman coins and whatever. We have a lot of stuff from the Confederacy and stuff from the colonies and whatever.

There’s also Bank of Galesburg money in there. There’s just like a $10 bill. It looks like a $10 bill. It just says Galesburg across the front of the face of the president, you know, and people are always like, “what is this?” And I’m like, “People took that. That was used. People took that here. People accepted that money.” I think we need to design for ease. We need to design, like you said, we don’t even call Starbucks dollars anything else but dollars. We need to design for, somehow, our intuition about it and then hopefully also in a way that makes it so that we can expand the function of these things as time goes. I also think there could be a lot to do, but not that much.

Kansas City is like, I mean, the metro area is like 3 million people or something, just about, 2.8 or something like this. It’s a lot of labor service hours. Could we stabilize neighborhoods with those labor service hours?

Absolutely. What is needed for someone to get their yard cleaned up? It’s time.  It doesn’t really cost almost anything. It’s a crew that’ll show up and help get all the trash in the dumpster. So there’s a lot I think there for the quality of life. There’s like a lot of opportunity for us to move resources towards increasing our quality of life in our built environment without having to think too big. It can become intuitive initially without being like, “this is a local job guarantee,” in the sense of like an employer of last resort, right? Which would be awesome.

Scott Ferguson

But you can do like a neoliberal frame Trojan horse. It’s like, “We’re just going to pilot this program. We’ll test it.”

I don’t want to let you go without asking you about this other aspect of your work, that, I mean, everything’s connected, but it doesn’t exactly fall into the discussion that we’ve been having so far in a narrow sense, which is, you’ve done some pretty serious historical research about the rise and fall and injustice of the Freedman’s Bank that was established after the Civil War for freed slaves and black people in the United States.

We can probably do a whole episode about this, but maybe you could just give us a little teaser, and then we’ll link to the paper in the show notes, but maybe you can just tell us about what you discovered and what you’re advocating for.

Ely Fair

This is like, yeah, another history project. Right after the Civil War, black Americans, recently freed, black Americans were very underbanked and so there was a unique chartered bank, the Freedman’s Bank, that was not under standard banking regulation, it was the only an inner state depository institution at the time and was chartered directly by Congress and was supposed to be overseen by Congress.

The purpose was to bank formerly enslaved black Americans. This was the idea, right? So it was supposed to be really conservative. They were like, “we’re only going to put our money into us bonds and in AAA securities,” a very conservative investment portfolio so that it would be like a secure depository institution, because this is for deposit insurance, for instance, Congress is supposed to oversee the bank. They didn’t. It rapidly expanded to over 30 branches across the south with millions of dollars worth of deposits from formerly enslaved people and then just kind of widespread fraud and capture. By 1873, it went bankrupt.

It turns out when it goes under that there was fraud at every kind of level you could imagine. But at the board level, they had not invested the portfolio in the way that they said they were going to or that they were required to by law, and instead they’d invested it in a bunch of speculative railroad bonds and also mining bonds.

For those history buffs, the one that might be listening, this is the Grant administration. We have the1873 financial crisis is actually about mining and railroad speculation bubble and basically invested all the money there and they just lost everything. So over the course of the next 15 years, depositors are able to get a little bit of their money back, but most of the money is just gone. At the time, there’s an inquiry in Congress, they’re like, “this was fraud. We were supposed to oversee this bank. We didn’t. We should get the money back.” The president’s like, “we should give the money back,” the comptrollers was like, “we should just allocate the money.” That kind of continues, actually, until the 19-teens that people are like, “oh, yeah, remember how we should give all those people back this money that they were defrauded of under the nose of Congress.” Then it never happens, right? Of course, there’s like a lot of racist pushback about allocating money towards black people, etc., etc., etc., a lot of vitriol, but also recognition that it was the duty of Congress to oversee this bank. They failed to do it. So, a lot of that history has been told.

One of the things I did then was to be like, “okay, if we assume that this bank didn’t go bankrupt and instead they had held the money in these conservative portfolios that they were supposed to hold the money in, but no one was just able to get it until now. How much money would there be?”

So one of the problems with doing this kind of historical restitution work, and part of the reason people in the United States broadly are so opposed to reparations is there’s this question of like, “who gets the money? Who do you give the money to? Like, why this random black person and not this other random black person should have? Should a black person have to have had enslaved ancestors? What if this person had more enslaved ancestors? Do they get more reparations? Why do we not give reparations to poor white immigrants who were also, disenfranchized?”

This kind of equity debate is constant. So I was trying to avoid that and say, “no, we have most of the books, the account books.”

We know the exact amount of money held by the people. We know how much money they got back. So that means if we can decide on what is a reasonable investment portfolio across this time period, we can tell you how much money would be in the account today if the account existed. Then, actually, the Freedman’s Bank deposit books are this treasure trove of genealogical information for Black America.

They’ve been digitized, and people have been using them to trace their ancestry. Then we get this kind of fun project where you say, “oh, there is money we restored in this bank account to its exact penny.” Given this portfolio decision, whose money is it? And then you get this kind of fun project of being like, “oh, I could do genealogical work, and I could find an ancestor of this person and be like, ‘oh, do you know that you have $10,000 in the bank account?’”

I did this estimation and was like, can this be reasonably done? The answer is yes. And now I’m going to pull it up and it turns out if it was just 100% long term US Treasury bonds, it’s about $1 billion and that’s about $2,200 per account. If it’s like 70% US bonds and 30% the S&P index, that’s like $5.8 billion, or about $12,000, $13,000 per account.

For context, in the US budget, $6 billion is a kind of normal pork barrel. It’s pretty big for some senator to win for their state, but it’s the kind of thing that is won for senators’ votes: $6 billion. This is also convenient compared to reparations. We’re talking about maybe $14 trillion, $6 billion is not very much money for the US government at this point.

For the average black family, $12,000 is actually quite a lot of wealth. In some ways, trying to use a historical injustice to make a very discrete claim for restitution that is not politically infeasible from a budgeting perspective and wouldn’t be earth shattering, but certainly would be a nice injection for the families that were kind of debunked when the US Congress committed this fraud 150 years ago.

Scott Ferguson

There’s also a collective memory project in multiple senses. What was this bank and what did the government do? I mean, all of these things would be part of it, in addition to thinking about genealogy for just the sake of genealogy and then genealogy for the sake of what is owed.

Ely Fair

Yeah, totally. It’s just a little project. I mean, we see this in full force now with Project 2025, but one of the things that the more kind of conservative, or I would say, regressive elements of our society have done very well is they have done these little research projects and then from them built model legislation that makes it really easy for people to be like, “oh, also this.”

Scott Ferguson

Yeah, right. Plug and play.

Ely Fair

Plug and play. Part of my hope in doing this work is that the project has been justified and kind of operationalized and there’s a scope and it’ll take like one person who’s like, “this seems like a cool pet project I could maybe get reelected in my district on,” who’s also on the Appropriations Committee to be like, I’d like this to go into the omnibus package and it would just happen. That background work has to occur before you can get that. I think there is a lot of space for us to do this kind of work of making easy wins for people that would also like to win in the way that we think winning looks like.

Billy Saas

Well Ely, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us on Money on the Left.

Ely Fair

Thank you so much.

* Thank you to Zachary Nosbisch for the episode graphic, Nahneen Kula for the theme tune, and Thomas Chaplin for the transcript.