Billy Saas and guest-host Will Beaman speak with Money on the Left’s own Scott Ferguson about his essay, “Endogeneity Without Exception: Modern Monetary Theory and the Promise of Heterodoxy,” published recently in the Journal of Economic Issues.
Across the episode, Ferguson re-examines the longstanding debate between endogenous and exogenous money theorists to rethink the foundations of heterodox economic analysis and politics. While orthodox economists understand money to be largely “exogenous,” rendering it external, scarce, and uncontestable, heterodox traditions celebrate money’s “endogeneity,” insisting that monetary forms are fundamentally social, institutional, and generative. Still, Ferguson argues, heterodox economists in Post-Keynesian and related traditions consistently slip into exogenous assumptions that distort political economic analysis and undercut money’s capacities to provide for all. Identifying endogeneity primarily with volatile private markets and treating revenue and debt service constraints as external, fatalistic limits, heterodoxy often naturalizes the very capitalist narratives of scarcity it seeks to overcome.
The conversation turns next to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). By extending endogeneity to public finance, MMT recasts money as a fundamentally generative and contestable public utility, which remains irreducible to private markets. This school arguably goes furthest to correct the exogenous assumptions in heterodox theory, Ferguson claims, only to introduce new exogeneities into its approach. Such exogeneities come to the fore principally in MMT’s opposition between “monetary sovereigns” that issue money and “currency users” that merely recycle funds that sovereigns issue. In contrast, Ferguson recommends replacing the zero-sum language of monetary sovereignty with more fruitful terms like “agency,” “capacity,” “power,” “authority,” “capability,” “care,” “sustainability” and “resilience.”
Ultimately, Ferguson contends that, despite powerful political, legal, and ideological constraints, all institutions and actors play meaningful roles in monetary generation, rather than functioning as mere recyclers of scarce funds. By embracing endogeneity without exception, he concludes, we open up vital, yet formerly repressed horizons for public provisioning, social experimentation, and anti-imperialist reparation.
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Transcript
This transcript has been edited for readability.
Billy Saas
Welcome, listener, to Money on the Left. We are here today to talk with Scott Ferguson about his recently published article, “Endogeneity Without Exception: Modern Monetary Theory and the Promise of Heterodoxy.” Scott is, of course, the regular co-host of the show. In order to have a full conversation, though, we feel like we did need to have two people in the host seats.
So we invited our good friend and comrade, Will Beeman, to join us. So, Will Beaman, welcome to Money on the Left.
Will Beaman
Hey, there. It’s gonna be hard to fill Scott’s shoes interviewing Scott.
Billy Saas
Hey, Scott, how are you doing today?
Scott Ferguson
I’m good, I’m good. Thanks for having me on my show.
Billy Saas
You know, it has been a long time coming. We did not sit down ever and talk about your wonderful book, Declarations of Dependance, when that came out.
Will Beaman
Can I also say you were a nightmare to get a hold of.
Billy Saas
Scheduling was atrocious. Your people weren’t getting back to my people.
Will Beaman
They were rude. They were us.
Scott Ferguson
I was hiding from myself. Yeah.
Billy Saas
Well, let’s talk about it. Yeah, obviously, in characteristic Scott fashion, this article does a tremendous amount. It does it very compellingly and is a brilliant read that we suggest everyone go check out. Its intervention is substantial to ongoing debate that I know from having been on this side of…well I guess not this side. Within this side of broader endogeneity.
Scott Ferguson
Which side are you on?
Billy Saas
We exist, of course, at Money on the Left in any broader ecology of MMT thinkers and commentators and the problem of sovereignty has been definitely front of mind and at the top of group chats for a while now. This, among other things, stages a really important intervention into that discussion. So I wonder just by way of setting up our conversation to come, could you situate and contextualize your own background or history of encounters with sovereignty as you came to encounter it eventually in MMT, and why this has stood out recently as such a significant problematic for you?
Scott Ferguson
Oh that’s interesting. I didn’t expect you to begin there!
I’ll say a little bit about that, but then I also want to step back and do some pre-situating as well. So, the modern monetary theory or modern money theory view is that money is a public utility and that currency issuing governments that are responsible for a monetary form that create and maintain a unit, can always afford what they would like to spend on, they cannot run out of their own unit of account. This, for us, at Money on the Left, for years, has had tremendous potential and power for left and progressive action and theorizing, and we’ve been pretty committed to it.
I think, in a deeper sense, for us at Money on the Left, we take MMT’s refusal of zero-sum thinking at the macro political economic level as a provocation to extrapolate that refusal across all spheres of society and history from studying ancient cultures to the varieties of modern art. We refuse zero-sum thinking every which way.
I think at a certain point, probably around 2018 for me, around the time that my first monograph, Declarations of Dependance was coming out, I began to become uncomfortable with Modern Monetary Theory’s appeals to sovereignty. They tend to be very nuanced and they’re not unsophisticated or uncomplicated, as I’d like to flesh out – maybe you can help me later on in this conversation – but they still rely on this logic of exceptionality and exclusion and opposition that denies money’s public creativity to certain spheres into certain actors. Something just didn’t sit right with me, and that violates our extrapolation of this non-zero-sum thinking to all spheres of history and society.
I think this especially became problematic once we were catapulted into the moment of the Covid 19 crisis, and suddenly many of our own institutions, most of us are in higher ed, not all of us, but many of us were in higher ed, were being threatened by premature threats of austerity, closures, firings, furloughs and we suddenly realized that this sovereignty logic and sovereignty constraint, which says, “well, only the federal government that issues the currency can afford to help everyone during moments of instability. The sub federal level and even the supra-federal level must be constrained to recycling finite funds that are supplied by the sovereign.”
We saw that this is not only theoretically problematic, but it is actively harming us in the present tense. Now, granted, it’s been actively harming us in the present tense forever. It’s not like it just came out of the woodwork during Covid and it wasn’t harming us. I just think it became acute and it came to our attention. I think as students of Modern Monetary Theory, I think for the first few years, we all just wanted to understand it and kind of extrapolate from it and ask a bunch of questions and figure out exactly what its implications were.
I just think it took a long time to kind of be able to get to the point where we were comfortable enough with thinking in this way in general, to turn back around and say, “oh, this paradigm isn’t perfect. It still needs some work, even though it’s very powerful.” I don’t disavow it. I think it’s still fundamental to what we do. So that’s what brought me to rethink sovereignty and to be rather critical of sovereignty. But I like to put a pin in that and just kind of step back and talk about how I got to this particular project. There’s probably a few origin stories, I think.
One is that, I’ve had a sense of, let’s say, frustration, working in this collective with my friends and comrades like you all and there’s many more of us, where we are trying to think out and through the MMT provocation in and beyond what MMT as an original school has permitted. I think we’ve done everything like just extending it to other spheres, nuancing places in the theory, in its original treatments, it might have been a little bit too rigid.
Or, in certain ways, MMT has been reduced to a series of slogans. What do those slogans even mean? We’ve complicated some of those slogans. So we’ve been doing all this work and I want to say, as a collective, this article takes a village, this is no exception. I thank plenty of people at the top of this article. I was especially helped by a burgeoning heterodox economist, Kyle More, who is an all but dissertation PhD student at UMKC, University of Missouri-Kansas City, one of the epicenters out of which the MMT project kind of coalesced and grew. He’s currently teaching at Bard College and works with Pavlina Tcherneva there.
He helped me a lot and you all helped me a ton. So, you know, standing on the shoulders of friends and giants and all sorts of creatures. But it grew out of a frustration that, to be perfectly honest, we just kept being ignored and I felt like some of the main MMTers ignore us, and some are nicer than others.
But I think where I got really frustrated was when I would read critique after critique by non-MMT people who were out to get MMT, certainly in the popular press or the leftist journalism and commentary, but also in academic articles. Left and critical heterodox economists who would come after MMT and essentially submit it to the same tired trial, which is posing the question, “Is MMT right or wrong? Does it apply to the world or not? Does it apply to X scenario? Does it apply to the Y scenario? Indeed it doesn’t. Or maybe kind of, but not really. It’s wrong. So, you know, good old institutional economics reign supreme. Let’s go back to our regularly scheduled programming and not be unsettled by this weird MMT thing.”
I was frustrated by that. Especially getting into 2019, 2020, 2021 because I felt like we at Money on the Left were — and it’s not like we’re alone, the MMTers themselves offer their own responses and nuances and sophisticated answers, but I felt like we were developing collectively all kinds of innovations and nuances that sometimes they were a little critical or put pressure on certain elements of Modern Monetary Theory.
But we treated Modern Monetary Theory as a living, breathing, what I started calling a “problem space” at a certain point. I felt like there were some kind of brute, or maybe inflexible formulations that circulate about MMT in MMT discourse that maybe don’t go as far as they could or aren’t as nuanced as they could be.
I felt like we at Money on the Left were coming up with nuances that actually defended MMT. Defended the paradigm. It bothered me that again and again I would read, whatever it was, left commentary or critical heterodox economics journal articles or books that would just keep attacking the worst straw man of these rigid truisms from MMT and just being big bullies and punching and swatting at these straw man, when I’m sitting here going, like, “Look, you’re not actually fighting the strongest articulation of these claims. You’re not.”
I felt like I had to get us into a heterodox journal. I have to stop publishing in humanities journals for a second, and I’ve got to publish the Money on the Left view, which is that money is public and it is endogenous.
We’ll talk about what that means for the uninitiated in a moment. Money is fully public, fully endogenous in its bases, and it is non-zero-sum at its core. What does that mean for political economy? And what does that mean for being in the world? So that was one of the biggest motivations for writing this and trying to place it in a heterodox economics journal. The first heterodox economics journal that I sent it to — I suppose I’ll be polite and not say the name of the journal — the peer reviews came back and they were really telling, they didn’t understand the article whatsoever. You know that they didn’t understand it because they weren’t able to recapitulate the main argument at the top and then go on to critique it. Instead, they just critiqued it.
One dismissed the article because they seem to be pro MMT. And they said, I don’t understand MMT and clearly MMT says this and you don’t understand that. And then the other person said they were anti MMT and they said MMT is wrong and how dare you defend it.
Will Beaman
The two genders.
Scott Ferguson
Yeah, the two genders. The editor was just like, “Thank you for your time. We’re done with you.” The editor didn’t want to work with me. The reviewers had spoken and that was it. So I sent it to a second journal, and that second journal was the Journal of Economic Issues.
That went through the process and that went a lot better. I managed to be able to publish it, and we’ll see. I mean, it’s still very new, but I guess I feel like at minimum now it will be conspicuous when a heterodox economist publishes a journal article or a book and comes at MMT and is just pretending like we don’t exist, pretending like our intervention isn’t part of the conversation.
So they can continue to do that and nothing is preventing them from doing that. But at least we have the solace in knowing that, “no, now they are actively doing it.” As academics, they should be doing literature reviews where they round up all the things that have been published about the topic and then respond to them.
If they keep ignoring us, we know that this is active ignoring and not just a result of just ignoring people that aren’t in their field and they don’t owe us a response because we’re just a bunch of humanities freaks who just care about movies and paintings and music and rhetoric.
Will Beaman
And one more thing, we’re not bitter.
Scott Ferguson
I am trying to be smiley and happy.
Will Beaman
We will put in the show notes that you’ve been smiling the whole time.
Scott Ferguson
I’ve been smiling. I have been smiling through my bitterness. Yes, yes.
Will Beaman
Well, let’s talk a little bit about the interventions in this article, and I’d like to actually start with the title, because I think that it ties together how Billy began by asking you about your history of critiquing and problematizing monetary sovereignty. This phrase, “Endogeneity without Exception,” I’m wondering if you can use that title to sort of give us some traction to define endogeneity and what does it have to do with exception. For listeners who are not quite following along, exception is often how sovereignty is defined so there’s some very fun wordplay going on here.
Scott Ferguson
Yeah. In fact, the original title had even more fun wordplay, but it got a little too confusing, I think. I didn’t want to have to write a whole other section to explain the word play, so I got rid of it. So originally the title was “Endogeneity without Reserve,” but then this raised all kinds of questions around the Federal Reserve System and reserve requirements and this kind of thing.
And I didn’t have room to explain that. Okay. So let’s begin with endogeneity. So endogeneity, the root of the word, basically the endo part means inside or internal, right? Geneity, it’s the same root that we get the word genesis. It means the origin and generation of some things, some entity, some system.
Historically the mainstream schools of economics, various breeds of neoclassical economics and those who follow them tend to treat money as exogenous, as an exogenous variable coming from somehow outside. Coming from the outside, it remains no a generative factor. In fact, most neoclassical models will exclude money, its creation, its design from all of their analyses. We hear all the time from them, in their writings and in their textbooks that money is a neutral veil over something else, whether that’s exchange or that’s utility or some kind of value. Then you can kind of put it to the side and not really deal with it. Then they can also treat money as a mere external exchange between individuals that get aggregated up into a massive system and on these premises, the mainstream is able to cast off governance and law and design as itself external, as itself interventionist in ways that tend to get in the way of the real operations of the market, which is where utility and exchange really belong and this all supports an ideology and a governing and legal regime of austerity, zero sum trade offs, punishing policies for the poor people of color, for our planet, etc..
What the heterodoxy has tended to do and especially post-Keynesians, these are Keynesians who followed Keynes, more closely than the neoclassical Keynesians that cropped up in the United States in the mid-century. Keynes’s program also began with an understanding that money is endogenous. But this got kind of stamped out when Keynes was absorbed by the neoclassical schools in the United States during the mid-century.
We like to talk about how Keynesianism ruled during the mid century and it was part of the era of the compromise between labor and capital and there was relatively, at least comparatively, robust government spending. So-called deficits weren’t so much of a problem, countercyclical spend. But this was all done really through a neoclassical prism that continued to really think exogenously.
So, the post Keynesians, following Keynes, but then carrying it over through mid-century all the way into the 60s and 70s, were trying to take endogenous money seriously. So for them, money is not a finite external quantity that goes up and down, and when there’s too much of it, that causes inflation and competition for government borrowing, etcetera, etcetera.
But instead, money is credit, it’s credit and debt relationships, and money expands internally and contracts internally, largely in the private financial system when there is more and less demand for credit. This changes the way that we not only think about money, but we also think about markets, the way we think about political economy writ large, the way we think about crises.
The post-Keynesians continue to think this way all the way to the present. The problem, as I see it, with post-Keynesian endogeneity, or what’s good about it, is they recognize that essentially money is a credit relationship. It’s socially constructed. It can be expanded and contracted in contingent circumstances and it opens up possibilities for policy and even design that would not just take the market at its word. At the same time, my sense in doing the reading and in consulting others like you all, but also some hardcore economists like my friend Kyle Mohr, that the post-Keynesian view really restricts what they think of as endogeneity to the market. It’s really about the financial market. It’s really about financial institutions. So financial institutions will expand and contract the amount of credit and debt in the system.
They have all kinds of ideas about government policies to react to or shape the endogenous world of financial markets, but they largely exclude government from the ambit of endogenous creation and design. So I want to be careful here. They’re not saying let the market do what it wants to do. No. They have all kinds of policies and those policies fly in the face of the mainstream. They mounted really strong, not accepted, but strong defenses in the 70s against the monetarists, when the Fed was being operated by these monetarist principles and they were jacking up interest rates with the idea that they were going to curb stagflation.
We all know how that went. They were saying, “don’t do it that way.” This is not to say that the post-Keynesian heterodoxy and then the heterodox schools that all subscribed to this view of endogenous money are just bad or they’re just so shortsighted. I mean, they have plenty to offer us and to teach us.
We should still think with them, but when they say money is endogenous, it tends to be just a reframing of the market. I would say, they naturalize, even if it’s socially constructed, they naturalize — or to use the Marxist term — they reify the market as a self standing sphere that expands and contracts on its own.
Then, yes, the government can intervene or shape things from the side or go in and out of the market in what I call “a game of hokey pokey.” The article is actually designed to take that on and to say, “okay, heterodoxy, we all say that money is endogenous, right?” I quote this one article by (Louis-Philippe) Rochon and (Sergio) Rossi from 2013, where they write, “Money has always been endogenous, irrespective of the historical period or of specific institutional arrangements.”
This tells you that the post-Keynesians think they’re just maximally endogenous. They think that they’re thinking, endogeneity without exception, without caveats. That quote says it’s always the case, it doesn’t matter. You could be under a gold standard or a metal standard. It doesn’t matter. It’s still endogenous. It’s still being generated as a function of the social construction of these financial institutions. It is not a finite thing that’s a quantity that acts like an external entity. So I’m taking the post-Keynesians and the heterodox at their word and saying they want to think, “endogeneity without reserve.”
That’s what they want to do. That’s what they say. But then I step back and I say, but “You’re not, you’re excluding you are excluding whole spheres.” One of those major spheres is monetary governance and the construction of law. Then I turn to MMT and I say, you know, MMT, as many of us on this podcast know, MMT develops out of the post-Keynesian tradition.
It also has influences in the institutionalist tradition. It has influences in even Marxism. It borrows from feminist economics, black economics. It’s a heterogeneous genesis, so to speak. But MMT does in many ways grow out of post-Keynesian endogenous monetary thinking. My claim is, and I’m not sure if I’ve read any MMTer put it this way, but my claim is that one way to characterize MMT and one of its major interventions or innovations is to broaden the domain of what counts as endogenous money creation, and to extend it to government and governance and law and legal construction.
I would say, not only does it extend, there’s something even wrong about that, because I wouldn’t even want to say that it extends endogeneity from the market to the government, but rather I also think it displaces the center of causality. Right. It says, “actually, this is a whole governance regime that is legally constructed and that sets up institutions that then create money endogenously all the time.”
It’s created and destroyed as claims of debt and credit that are interdependent and interlinked. It shifts the center and says, “look, the sphere of endogeneity is so much bigger.” Essentially, it is coincident with the problem of politics. This is, to me, reading MMT at its most maximal, which is to say that, if there are entities called markets or systems called markets, they’re a contingent construction of this broader public endogenous system.
You could imagine a public endogenous system that doesn’t have what we would call markets. Or maybe you could construct a system that has markets that look very different than the ones we have. That’s the general kind of setup and framing. I’m saying, we as a heterodoxy say we want endogeneity without exception, but we don’t quite get there.
MMT expands this to say, “actually all money is a public endogenous utility.” Then from there, I ask the question, “does MMT go far enough?” Ultimately, I say, “no, it doesn’t go far enough because it has its own lingering attachments to what I consider to be an exogenous logic and that’s where sovereignty comes in.”
But then there’s also all kinds of other issues along the way in heterodoxy, writlarge, in addition to MMT, about variables, what kind of variables are treated and what counts as a crisis and things like that.
Will Beaman
Thank you for that explanation. It occurred to me while you were speaking that there’s a little bit of a tension that I’m wondering if we can dwell on and situate your article within, where the kind of post-Keynesian story does not theorize law, particularly, and relies on a tacit liberal imagination of a kind of negative space that is the market and demand bubbles down from there and drives all of these endogenous cycles and dynamics. On the other hand, we have this monetary sovereignty discourse, which has been very productively complicated with respect to law. In the law and political economy space, there is thinking about, “maybe sovereignty is a spectrum,” rather than simply something that you either have or you don’t.
Maybe you have relative amounts of it and it’s relational. I’m wondering where your intervention fits within that broader landscape that’s not just reducible to post-Keynesianism.
Scott Ferguson
First of all, I want to say not just in the law and political economy space, but within MMT itself, you have thinkers like Pavlina Tcherneva, Fadhel Kaboub, and others like Nathan Tankus, all former guests on this program who have a very sophisticated approach and a nuanced approach to what they call, “monetary sovereignty.”
So first of all, they distinguish monetary sovereignty from sovereignty. They’re very explicit about that. Monetary sovereignty is a very particular kind of category. I think, for them, they would say it’s like an aspect of or a subcategory of political sovereignty, and it shapes political sovereignty. But it is not just the same as political sovereignty.
I wouldn’t say that’s my understanding. They all, as you suggested, and as I pointed out in the article, this is not a question of accrued having and not having. Sometimes MMT discourse as it circulates in popular circles online and elsewhere, sometimes, we here talk of, “the US and Japan have monetary sovereignty because they issue their own currencies, but, you know, X and Y countries in the global South, after suffering hundreds of years of imperial and colonial domination, they don’t have monetary sovereignty. They don’t have it. There are those who have it and then it’s a battle between the one group and the other group,” or something. You know, that’s not how they talk.
That’s not how they write. That’s not how they reason. I think that both explicitly and implicitly, I think they refuse maximalism on either end. I think they don’t say that, if the United States is a global hegemonic and we have, since the Bretton Woods agreements, we’ve basically presided over what’s often called a dollar standard or a dollar reserve currency system.
I don’t find that MMT discourse says, “Ah. Therefore, the US has an unlimited maximum monetary sovereignty where it can just do what it wants at any given moment.” They acknowledge not only are there political ideological limits, but, using their language, I wouldn’t necessarily talk this way, but, there’s a real constraint and that is real resources and if you spend in excess of real resources’ ability to be mobilized, you’re creating inflationary pressures. Like I said, I think I have a more nuanced understanding of that now, but that’s typical.
Will Beaman
Well, maybe we can pause right there. I think that this actually connects quite well to the type of nuanced move that you’re doing in this piece, and kind of insisting on no exceptions to endogeneity, because the rhetorical appeal that we hear to real resources, it both expands the conversation and in the same move, buttons it back up around a kind of given array of real resources.
The kind of, what I would call, an endogenous definition of what is considered a resource or not is sort of bracketed from that analysis in order to appeal to the idea that the economy has a speed limit that is sort of set by this underlying material substrate that money only represents. Then we’re back in something a little bit more conventional.
00;37;58;25 – 00;38;43;14
Scott Ferguson
Yeah, exogenous, right. I mean, this is a bit of a deep cut, but I don’t mind. We can dive into the crevasse and then come back to slightly shallower waters. We all have had these intuitions for a long time. I think our original audio engineer, Alex Williams, who is now a heterodox economist in his own right, recommended this classic heterodox economics article in the institutionalist tradition by a scholar named (Thomas R. De) Gregori from 1987, and the title of his essay sums it all up: “Resources are Not; They Become.”
So what is that arguing? That’s arguing, not that resources aren’t material or that you can just make them up out of thin air. This article instead suggests that, in order to even recognize something or constitute something as a resource, a material resource, that’s a social project.
We had to figure out that fossil fuels could be an enormous resource. Before science and technologists and politicians and all kinds of discourses came along and said, “various fossil fuels can do all this work for us,” it wasn’t a resource at all.
Then research in green energy is essentially pushing the boundaries of that and saying, “what can we socially construct as a resource?” The false move here is to have a kind of clean binary between, “social construction, which isn’t real, it’s just fake. It’s just language and words or just dollars or something. Then there’s real material, hard things that you can touch.” Instead, they’re always bound up with one another. I’m speaking into a microphone right now. I can’t just say, this microphone could power my car, and I’m going to try to stick it in my car and see what happens.
It’s not that anything can be socially constructed as a resource, but resources are socially constructed. They’re not inert things with a finite limit as exogenous entities that provide a natural speed limit to spending. Instead, the speed limit is precisely social construction, which is endogenous. Actually, that leads me back to where I was going to go, which is to say that, to give credit where credit is due, the sophistication of monetary sovereignty as theorized by the main MMT economists, they do often think of it as a speed limit.
Like a pacing issue. Not a hard constraint, but just a question of, “How things are being cultivated? How is policy activating resources and at what pace?” That matters as well.
Will Beaman
Yeah. That can turn an inert kind of vulgar speed limit argument into one that is much more about how we sequence dilating social provisioning processes to whatever we want them to be qualitatively.
Scott Ferguson
Right, exactly. On the other end of the spectrum, to pick up the thread, I’m actually shocked that I’m able to do this. I don’t think they’re ever going to say that there is a people, a country, an entity that is so abject and so excluded that it could never participate in public endogenous monetary creation.
Especially for our friends who work on postcolonial or decolonial economics from an MMT point of view, people like Fadhel Kaboub and our friend Ndongo Samba Sylla. That’s precisely their claim. Their claim is to say that, there’s always hope. A people, a country, a governance structure can always start issuing credits.
Is that going to immediately, overnight, erase centuries of oppression and extraction of physical resources and neglect of collective cultivation, or put all the global powers to rest? Absolutely not. But we are falsifying the situation if we just depict any country or any peoples as utterly powerless. We’re cutting ourselves off at the feet.
We’re our own worst enemy. The spectrum perspective in MMT says there’s no actual maximum. There’s no actual minimum to the point where you know that an entity, a group, a nation, whatever it is, is just powerless. Instead, what you have is various degrees of capacity of resource mobilizing potential given the current situation. So that’s really sophisticated, and that and that’s not always represented in critiques. So that’s what I’m trying to honor. But then I say, at the very same time, many of the same thinkers are going to lean into the political understandings of sovereignty, and they’re going to quickly naturalize the deep implications of the logics of sovereignty that have been around since the late Middle Ages-early modernity, when that term arose. Something that I figured out with the help of somebody else who’s been on the Superstructure podcast with me, Brendan Cook, who is my colleague at the University of South Florida and knows languages like no one else. He’s fluent in Latin. He can make his way around Greek and most of the romance languages he has some facility with. So he helped me see how, when scholars will say that Aristotle had a theory of sovereignty, that’s just not true. He didn’t talk about sovereignty. That’s a later word. It’s a romance language word that comes about in early modernity or late medieval, whenever you make that break, basically. The medieval world was organized around many terms, but the highest term was this term, imperium.
It just means rule. It just means political and legal ordering. Later on, it would become the basis for empire. We don’t like empire. We would never support empire. But that’s not what imperium meant. It didn’t have that negative connotation. Which is not to say that the medieval rule under imperium was some kind of glorious democracy. It wasn’t. Nevertheless, the understanding of imperium was that it was all kinds of interdependent, nested, overlapping domains and purview and responsibilities and obligations and capacities. There wasn’t just one entity, one single source of power that stood above them all. You had just to quickly sketch it. You had the Roman Catholic Church. You had the Holy Roman Empire. These are two different entities. Then you had all kinds of kingdoms and manners and townships, and they all had their own purview, their own domains, their own ambits of responsibility. They would be contested all the time, and there would be all kinds of crises where the Pope’s trying to flex power against the emperor and they’re arguing about who can appoint bishops. These are huge battles of the late Middle Ages. But the idea is that everybody kind of understood that even if everyone’s jockeying for relative power, there’s an understanding that we’re all kind of entangled in this mess together.
There’s no outside. The theory of sovereignty is that it started to get articulated in late medieval, early modernity, tried to disentangle that and tried to find a kind of Archimedean point outside of the system and would say, “look, political rule has to be above it all and outside of it all,” essentially what I would call exogenous.
Very often, these theories of sovereignty then led to enlightenment understandings of and justifications for political rule that would rely on these fantasies that would start in a state of nature where there was no society, it was just a bunch of individuals or little family units or clans.
Then somehow they had to come together and then decide what would be a legitimate form of rule and hold up the sovereign above everybody else as a kind of representative of all of us. That’s sort of the Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan approach. Or there is the more imminent, bubbling up approach, from below. The John Locke kind of approach where we all just kind of tacitly agree that we’re going to live in society together.
Our government can be sovereign in that way. So to me, this is all just a fantasy. It’s just not true at all that sovereignty as an understanding of political rule is somehow outside of not just social, political, but also ecological and even cosmic interdependence. It’s utterly BS.
There’s nothing true about it. Everything is dependent on everything else. It’s heterogeneously dependent. It’s not flat, but there’s no outside. There’s no outside, there’s no acting from outside. The problem becomes, when MMT brings that logic of exceptionality and ‘the outside’ to thinking about monetary capacities and powers and responsibilities at different scales of governance…
So there’s two things here: One, there’s a danger of just the intimation. Why even use that word in the first place? You’re using a word that means exogenous thinking. That means outside. That means absolute power. Your own nuanced thinking doesn’t necessarily have to take us there. You could just be using the word, but semantically translating it and using it in a different way.
I would say, “you, MMT, do that to an extent.” The problem is when they start talking about the difference between monetary sovereigns and non-sovereigns, that gets codified in this opposition between monetary sovereigns as currency issuers versus monetary users as non-sovereigns, then that language of exceptionally has a semantic grip that is detrimental to any kind of left-monetary-thinking and really gets in the way of the the broader post-Keynesian supposed commitment to endogeneity without exception.
When an MMTer will say the federal government and the United States can create as much money as it wants to and give it to someone. Actually, that’s Alan Greenspan, but that’s another story. The question is just the available resources to mobilize. But then everyone else; our states, our municipalities are nonprofits. Everyone else has to simply recycle the finite funds that have been emitted through the government or the licensed financial institutions that create the dollar on behalf of the US government.
I think to myself, “Wait a minute.” It’s not just me. We all think to ourselves on Money on the Left, “Wait, it’s either all endogenous or it’s not.” If it’s all endogenous, then states and municipalities, they’re participating in this endogeneity as well. There are strong laws and ideologies that tell us: “No, no, no, they are mere currency users that merely recycle funds.”
I think our commitment in this research collective of ours is to say, “no, it’s not.” Which is not to say that the state of Connecticut has the same monetary capacities as the federal government. You could say that the government has, in a crude, quantitative way, more capacity or has a larger ambit that extends across the entire globe.
On the other hand, you might even say that the state of Connecticut has, in certain qualitative ways, more monetary capacity because they can respond to local needs and local institutions and local requirements in a way that the federal government, maybe at this time, cannot. So the point is not to flatten things. The point is not to say, “Oh, everyone’s a monetary sovereign and everyone should print as much money as they want.”
The point is to say, if we’re going to really, really take seriously this call to think ‘endogeneity without exception,’ then of course, we have to go with MMT and say that it’s public, it’s publicly designed, even the private parts. Haha. Private parts. But also we have to get rid of this sovereignty language because it’s re-introducing new logics of exogeneity that are hurting us and are not only getting in the way of truth, but are getting in the way of fighting for a better world.
Will Beaman
It also, I think, shapes where our attention is distributed in terms of different horizons. Because, we have talked, for example, about universities issuing bonds or in the context of the Seattle Loop, which we have talked quite a bit about. I encourage readers to check out our writings and podcasts about it. We get into coordination between different public institutions in order to sell and purchase municipal bonds and this kind of thing. Even the spectrum version of sovereignty, it says basically, “well, so is the goal to make a university sovereign.”
Scott Ferguson
Right. People have responded that way.
Will Beaman
Yeah. Or is the goal for Seattle to secede from the union or is this relative degrees of secession. You have this imaginary of sovereignty as a relation between a will and space that it can act upon and it glosses over a ton of coordination and dependence that is necessary to make that happen as an effect.
But also it has a much more capacious horizon because you’re no longer trying to theorize a world where, “liberate all the entities, make them all sovereign and unrelated to each other.” It leads to these sort of odd places at scale, where then you then have to reinstall some kind of correct distribution of silencing. Otherwise where this would actually lead would just be to cancel out dependency at a bunch of sort of arbitrary nodes.
Scott Ferguson
Something else I wanted to point out for anybody who’s paying attention to this record is that I wrote this text and revised and edited it largely during the second two years of the Biden administration. It came out halfway through Trump 2.0. We were back in this moment where a kind of neoliberalism with a human face. The first couple years of the Biden administration, because of pressure from the left, because of Bernie’s influence, because of the squad’s influence, because of the way that electoral power and shenanigans went down, I think the Biden administration was more open to some more capacious fiscal policy and industrial policy, even as they were continuing to play by a neoliberal playbook and spending a lot to incentivize private innovation, yada, yada, yada.
This is tabling a lot of the early Covid spending under Trump and Biden as well. Then, of course, the latter half of the Biden administration started to drag, to feel more and more neoliberal. I’m not here trying to characterize everything. I’m just talking about, in a narrow sense, fiscal policy kinds of ideology and talk and policy.
I guess I just didn’t think that after January 6th that Trump would be reelected. I wasn’t thinking in terms of a resurgent fascism, or authoritarianism and the kinds of extremism and illegal fiscal sabotage that would ensue.
Even though this article has come out, it feels like I wrote this article at a very different moment than when it was released. I just want to acknowledge that and I want to say that I feel like I was speaking to a world of a sluggish neoliberalism, rather than the kind of extreme environment that we find ourselves in the Trump 2.0 administration where, as we’ve learned very well many times over in different ways from Will, your writings, the neoliberal logics of fiscal sabotage, which rely on exogenous ideology and laws and methods, have been maximalized to become authoritarian fiscal sabotage.
I think I’ve learned from you, especially watching you think this moment through, that Trump is not, while, yes, he’s an exception in certain ways, yes, MAGA is an exception in certain ways, but in other ways you can say that what the fiscal sabotage under Trump 2.0 is revealing is that it’s just being unabashedly and ruthless and avowedly evil and ideological, but doing the same thing that neoliberal finance does.
It’s just that neoliberal finance hides behind natural laws and necessities and an exogenous paradigm where it can kind of tuck its values and its agendas between its proverbial legs, so to speak.
Will Beaman
I find it amusing that in a certain way, what you’re saying is after January 6th, you overlooked fascism’s endogeneity.
Scott Ferguson
It’s true, it’s true. Yeah.
Will Beaman
To flesh out that kind of bad joke, one of the things I’ve been developing in my writings for the Money on the Left Vertical about this moment, is that there’s all kinds of neoliberal habits of governance that have furnished Trumpism with all kinds of rhetorical playbooks and journalistic reporting habits and the kind of stupefaction with which everyone approaches the market and what the market wants to do is affectively very inhabitable by an authoritarian who wants to stupefy people and turn hard choices into shakedowns and all of that kind of thing. But yeah, it is funny to me that the culprit ultimately is that fascism is not fascism, and that’s why it’s still here.
Scott Ferguson
Yeah. That’s right and that neoliberalism is already a kind of a kind of fascism in disguise.
Will Beaman
Which I think really reframes helpfully a lot of the kind of tired debates that try to periodize this moment and say, “are we under neoliberalism or under fascism?” Really, what you’ve had the whole time is multiple legibilities that relate dynamically to one another.
Billy Saas
Right. This has been great. I’m trying to put on the habit of the erstwhile fan of MMT reviewer who found cause to reject your paper, and I imagine that part of what might have made them uncomfortable would be, no one is essentially safe here. Hyman Minsky’s own work, which is so critical to MMT.
Scott Ferguson
He’s a bit of a sacred cow.
Billy Saas
He’s a bit of a sacred cow.
Will Beaman
Yeah. Too big to fail.
Scott Ferguson
Yeah.
Billy Saas
His work on crisis is subject to the Fergusonian scrutiny that we love you for. I wonder if you could say a little bit about the importance of your examination of the theory of crisis as it plays out in MMT and its interplay with the exceptional endogeneity that you identify in the broader MMT discourse.
Scott Ferguson
Yeah. I mean, I guess what I would say is, the way I frame it is more in terms of heterodoxy centered around post-Keynesianism. My sense is that many of the institutional economists too have an endogenous theory. They more identify through the institutional tradition.
I feel like I’m more speaking about heterodoxy writ large and then MMT is a part of it. I guess I would say that MMT in certain ways counteracts this tendency that I will identify in a moment. My main target isn’t even necessarily MMT itself, even if there’s an ambivalence or, I don’t think they get off scot free here. I guess pun intended.
Will Beaman
Endogeneity without Scott.
Scott Ferguson
Something I’ve been concerned about for a very long time and to be honest, this really grew in me in terms of my critique of Marxism — only later did I come to understand that it also very much informs the broader heterodoxy, post-Keynesianism and fellow travelers — which is this sense that, “Okay, we reject the mainstream, we reject general equilibrium theory, we reject perfect information, we reject anything that suggests that there’s no time, there’s no power imbalance, there’s no opacity of information.”
The heterodoxy is good because it puts pressure on all those mainstream claims. That’s an important thing to do. The problem is, at least as I see it, they then turn around and have this romantic, gothic imaginary that romanticizes crisis. They’ll say that instability is constantly on the horizon, and it’s always tending toward crisis.
Different heterodox traditions do this differently. Marxism has its own versions of doing this. The entire system is built upon contradiction after contradiction after contradiction, whether it’s the contradiction between, so-called, use value and exchange value, or the contradiction between the owners of production and the proletarian class. I mean, the contradictions are endless. All those contradictions lead to instability and crisis necessarily because of the, so-called, capitalist mode of production.
Like I said, I had a pretty strong and growing critique of the reifying of the necessity of crisis in Marxism, because I had MMT over here telling me that, “You don’t ever have to have a crisis. You can always create more public money to address things when things are becoming unstable.”
Then I was realizing more and more that post-Keynesian and heterodox analysis tends, even though they’re saying money is endogenous and it’s being created by financial institutions all the time, they tend to still that the financial system and the financial markets as extending into commodity markets, they have their own kind of inertia.
They have their own kinds of tendencies toward instability. They operate in a semi-autonomous way. There they have a kind of, what I call, an “automaticity” to them, which is also Marxist language. What this does is this puts money creation, money design, transformations in the monetary system outside of the so-called natural tendencies of the system.
Everybody has been talking about the bailout society or the bailout state. I think for good Marxists, it’s like, “see, I told you, capitalism doesn’t work. Now it’s gotten so bad that we have central banks around the world that are constantly…”
Will Beaman
“Now capital’s borrowing from itself to save itself.”
Scott Ferguson
All of that requires you to naturalize this thing, this entity, this system called a market that has its own internal laws. If you’re a critic, you’re like, “look, those laws lead to terrible things and they and everything breaks down and it tends toward crisis.” This just doesn’t allow for, not only like so-called government intervention, and which we wouldn’t even call it intervention, but it doesn’t even allow for the fact that, look, if money is endogenous, then it’s constantly being invented and reinvented all the time.
It’s never about a private, finite stockpile that has to be earned in the form of revenue or borrowed in the form of credit and then recycled. But I think that all of that is exogenous thinking. I think that revenue constraints, depletion of savings, borrowing constraints, all of these become what I would redeem as exogenous variables that heterodoxy redefines as necessary, rather than looking around and saying, “okay, you know, what are the variables?”
Well, one variable is that we have a federal insurance system, FDIC insurance, that only insures up to $250,000. Then that causes all kinds of pressures to create a shadow banking sector. What if we just change the rules and then certain crises will go away.
Certain variables count as these hard determining factors and then there’s often a tipping point. If enough competing agents in the market can’t meet their debt service, then it’s a domino effect and then one is going to collapse after the other after the other.
Instead of saying, “no, no, no, there’s all kinds of variables and really crises are actively socially constructed by financial journalists, by financial experts, by the current design of the system. Also the current redesigning of the system, the system is never just designed and then stays still. It’s constantly being fiddled with even in micro-ways all the time. So my critique is that heterodoxy ends up having this romantic, dark story of a necessity toward crisis that brings a worldview to bear on problems of political economy and social provisioning that should not be there. It just creeps right back in and essentially disciplines us and says what we can and cannot do.
I like the speed limit language when it’s used in certain ways because it recognizes that there are political, social, aesthetic, ideological, and affective obstacles. I mean, for sure. No one’s saying that there aren’t. There’s rhetorical ones. That’s what our show is all about. It’s trying to reframe the rhetoric, reframe even how we think about this in the first place.
So the point is not, we can do everything and anything. We can just have magical fixes to any problem overnight. That’s not the point, because we can’t. Even in a world where we snap our fingers and suddenly everyone thinks like we do, that’s still not going to work that way. The difference is; is the paradigm, is our collective understanding of what the problem is, is it relying on reified variables that necessarily lead us into crisis, or are we actually treating a whole host of variables as endogenous and manipulable and we can prevent a housing crisis from devolving into a really, really, really big problem?
Billy Saas
We get to identify, of course, in the exceptional endogeneity frame, phenomena, crises, we might say, of, as you do in the article, black unemployment as not remarkable enough to merit any significant intervention, or not threatening the system in a systemic way.
Scott Ferguson
I’m still nervous about this kind of counterexample. I bring up the fact that, there’s all kinds of phenomena that we could equally call crises. MLK said on any number of occasions that there is a Great Depression in the black community.
A Great Depression should be a systemic crisis of apocalyptic proportions. He said that about black employment throughout the 20th century until he was assassinated. Heterodox economics wants to kind of, I’d say, fetishize and even reify the tendency toward crisis when it comes to debt leveraging and all these kinds of things and say, “there’s a tipping point, a certain point where there’s enough credit default swaps and then people can’t pay other people, and those people can’t pay other people, and the whole pyramid comes tumbling down.” As far as I know, no heterodox economist puts it in that way. Like that there is some tipping point that when the black unemployment rate reaches a certain level, that it’s somehow unsustainable.
I mean, I would just say, “yeah, double digit black unemployment has always been unsustainable.” But nobody has ever said that that violates some kind of metaphysical principle and that that should be the ultimate horizon in which we are thinking about political economy and policy answers to ongoing problems.
Will Beaman
Yeah. I mean, it’s the contrary. There is supposedly, in neoclassical economics, a natural rate of unemployment that is within the context of perfect markets’ narrative that disavows or at least disavows crises as systemic, but then it also is sort of obsessed with what needs to be disciplined in order to prevent crises. Unemployment then fits in there as something that, far from being a crisis, is — in the MMT language — an automatic stabilizer that goes up and down in ways that control distribution and demand and prevent the economy from running too hot and all of that kind of thing.
One of the things that I’m hearing that’s interesting, just kind of dwelling a little bit more on this the speed limit language as you are transvaluing it versus the crisis version, when we talk about a speed limit, not as a tipping point beyond which bad things will happen that are irreversible, but instead a kind of sequencing problem.
We then end up reframing what you might call limits, but that word feels less and less helpful. We start to look at them more as design problems and design provocations. In a certain way that sort of thing, whether it’s Marxist explanations or certain institutionalist explanations, their version of how institutions form endogenously in relation to crises, is in relation to an exogenous crisis that requires capital to conspire to make a new institution to bail itself out.
In a way, I feel like that is sort of the dark doppelganger of what it is you’re describing, which is a much more above board and inclusive problem space of limits as design problems and prompts for new institutional design.
Scott Ferguson
Yeah. And I mean, let’s take the Money on the Left, “Loop” project that was inaugurated by Tyler in our collective. It is something we’ve been thinking through and promoting and talking to people on the ground in Seattle and in Maine and in Orlando and the San Francisco Bay area. If you are not familiar, if you’re just dropping into this podcast from elsewhere, our proposal is that states and municipalities, at least starting in the United States — feel free to take this and run with it, everyone else — states and municipalities should create public banks. That usually means the state legislature creating a legal framework for doing so and then actually establishing these public banks. Then they could move all public money and all public holdings out of the private, speculative, high cost Wall Street banking system into their own banks.
That’s how you would capitalize the bank. Then we can essentially end the extreme austerity, the extreme, Henny Penny, the sky is falling, “our budgets are getting too big” hysteria, by having our public banks be the single designated buyers of our public debt. So a state or a municipality, like Washington state or Seattle can issue bonds and have their public banks buy them, and then if they want to, they can do — what we are calling — “loop” the interest payments right back to the state or municipality in the first place.
What this does is take the current legal system of credit creation, tweaks it a little bit in order to provide a low or no interest form of money creation, of credit creation, out of thin air for the sub federal level without actually breaking any laws. Now, are we for smashing the liberal and neoliberal legal order in this country and around the world?
Absolutely. This is a policy that’s meant to be a kind of point of leverage in that system that is doable for those who don’t want to start day one by saying let’s have a constitutional amendment to the US Constitution and allow our states and municipalities just to create credit directly. I mean, I think ultimately that’s what we would like.
So this is a kind of strategic way up that mountain, so to speak. Is there a private banking lobby that would get in the way? Sure. Is there a limit to public understanding of these things? Sure. But those aren’t reasons not to try and not to educate, not to get out the word, not to strategize, not to fight for this future. From a post-Keynesian perspective or even a maybe more crude MMT 101 perspective, the reality is there are certain variables and they are the present state of the economy in these different states and municipalities, their taxing power or how much they can tax at any given time, both legally, but also just politically.
What do they feel like they can get away with, taxing-wise? Also bonds and bond rating agencies and the rules about what kinds of expenditures you can use bonds to pay for. A kind of typical heterodox analysis of the present situation would say, “yeah, you know, states and municipalities can only go so far and there is a crisis. Washington state is overleveraged and they better get their house in order because they just recycle the endless money that is…
Will Beaman
Because they’re not Washington, D.C. — the federal government, that is.
Scott Ferguson
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, Washington, D.C. itself is fucked.
Will Beaman
Washington, D.C. is even more disempowered
Scott Ferguson
It’s even worse.
But yeah, right. They’re not the feds. I think that the “Loop” proposal says, “hey, let’s not refine the same damn variables that the orthodoxy does and then just say, ‘we’re screwed.’” Instead, the public, endogenous, “without exception” perspective of Money on the Left says, “no, there’s always something you can do.” If there’s trouble, or if Washington state needs to spend money on social housing because people are without homes, if it needs to spend money on ecological crises, then there are ways to make that happen. We just need a full blown endogenous public money imagination to actualize new forms of design that are going to meet those troubles. My critique is not to say there are no crises. My critique is that the paradigm naturalizes crises by only paying attention to certain variables and essentially tacitly treating them as exogenous.
Will Beaman
Yeah. And I think this “Loop” example, and also just what you’re saying about your critique of exogenous crisis thinking, illuminates what is both a historical and theoretical problematic in post-Keynesianism and heterodox economics, that is not always fully historicized or its historicism is not followed through in all that it implies, which is that money creation has been relocated to banking as institutions.
Typically then, where post-Keynesianism will go with that is, “So, then we need to study the dynamics of banking in order to understand this money creation power that has been usurped.” Whereas what I’m hearing from you is that, you can exploit that it has been relocated to banking by following it into banking in a constructive institution building way.
You can transvalue the public underpinnings of banking in the institutional arrangements and institutional functions that it performs, rather than having that insight become just a proxy for, “So, let’s defer to the banking sector.” Which, I think, frankly, was why we were a little bit late to the game on public banking because the language of banking is so reified and is so historically complicit in monetary silencing. From our perspective, it’s all fiscal, anyway. I think it was easier ten years ago to be like, “you know, well, let’s talk about fiscal politics rather than going a step down from that in terms of reification.” Yeah, I think that we’ve learned a little better.
Billy Saas
Now I just want to flag an acronym that I think will be really useful moving forward. It’s “FBEMPMC” (Full-Blown Endogenous Mode of Public Money Creation).
Scott Ferguson
It just rolls off the tongue.
Will Beaman
I thought you were gonna tell me STFU
Billy Saas
No, not this time. Not on microphone. Maybe one way to kind of wind our way to a conclusion here would be to ask, what would you like to see and what might we stand the most to gain from in a change in the way MMT — your public facing, well-known, MMT economists — talk about and do MMT in public instead of sovereignty. What do we say?
Scott Ferguson
Oh I see. Okay. I thought you were asking a question that I wasn’t really prepared to answer, but you targeted. So I appreciate it. Yeah. So something that I’ve argued actually in several papers, several works, but this is the first peer-reviewed, fancy publication. We can rely on any number of terms.
And to be honest, MMT already does it. It already does. When they talk about fiscal sovereignty or they talk about monetary sovereignty, they define that by saying, “oh, that means a certain amount of capacity. It means a certain speed limit. It means a certain kind of ambit of responsibility.” We might talk about when an MMTer says, “Let’s reclaim monetary sovereignty,” something you could say is, “what they really mean is they’re reclaiming agency and they’re reclaiming resiliency and they’re reclaiming the creativity that public endogenous money allows. So I actually think that’s not that hard. I’m all about coining a million terms. “Word printer go brrr.” I’m all for it.
I kind of feel that we’re sitting pretty well, I just think, let’s get rid of the sovereignty word and the sovereignty logics. To be honest, I would even be okay — uh, maybe — I guess I would sit on my hands if the sovereignty language was around but it wasn’t actually flexed semantically.
If it wasn’t like, “there are users and issuers and all the users have to recycle finite funds, and they’re basically trapped in this system of perpetual crisis.” If they wanted to use the word sovereignty but not presuppose that or argue that, then I suppose that would be okay. But yeah, we use all kinds of words like capacity and resilience and agency that we can use instead. To speak to the broader question, we want to unlock the public monetary imagination, both for diagnosing the world and the problems that we heterogeneously share together — whether that’s climate change or radical inequality or exploitation — but also at the very same time as we’re diagnosing those problems, we are empowered collectively through our paradigm, through our imagination, through our ability to mobilize words and imagery, to constantly come up with solutions, constantly come up with, “wow, our system of states and municipalities are really struggling under the thumbs of the bond rating agencies and this kind of thing, let’s have a whole system of what we’re calling ‘loops’ and let’s just put the municipal bond market out of business.” There’s no really good argument for the municipal bond market to exist.
It’s not really serving any public purpose. It’s just serving Wall Street. Why would we do that? Let’s not do that anymore. And again, then the fight begins. I’m not saying that the powers that be, the vested interests aren’t going to — as I sometimes will put it — crush us like little bugs.
That might happen. But the point is, we’re not crushing ourselves like little bugs before we even open the front door to confront the problems of the world. That’s what I want.
Will Beaman
Are you a currency issuer or a currency bug?
Scott Ferguson
I am both. Thank you for asking. I’m on record as saying I am both.
Billy Saas
Well, great. Scott, I think that’s a good place to leave it. But, you know, as a co-host, what do you think?
Scott Ferguson
I think it’s a good place to leave it. There’s more, so there’s reasons to keep reading. We didn’t really talk about the international sphere very much. We can table that if you want it. There’s more little gems in the essay. I recommend it. You’ll either enjoy it or it’ll make you extremely mad. Enjoy
Will Beaman
Well, I thought you dodged most of my questions, but, I guess we’ll let viewers decide.
Will Beaman
Thank you.
Scott Ferguson
Thank you.
* Thank you to Zachary Nosbisch for the episode graphic, Nahneen Kula for the theme tune, and Thomas Chaplin for the transcript.
