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Bill: Well hello and today I'm talking to Professor Scott Ferguson, who's in the Humanities area at the University of South Florida. And he does a lot of work in in the area of Humanities, Cultural Studies and those things and he'd become very interested in Modern Monetary Theory. And his work is illustrating, in my view, the the breadth in which we can work together in across the Social Sciences and within cross-Social Sciences in the Humanities. So Scott, welcome and thanks for joining us.

Scott: Thanks for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

Bill: Yeah and so can you just tell us what you say, the relationship between the work in Modern Monetary Theory and your work in the Humanities?

Scott: What gives - it's a very interesting proposition? It is an interesting proposition. Yes, so obviously, Modern Monetary Theory begins with a set of unfamiliar and I believe more correct and I would say more capacious ideas about the way that not just economics works on a narrow sense, but the way that we might say political economy works with the way our society is - the way we live together as to use the Greek word - the 'polis', how the 'polis' operates and the polis operates not just through fiscal policy and treasury central bank operations, but also through culture and through art and through the kinds of values that we are making in in our culture and in our media. So what I do is I study culture and media and what I've done in my project is to ask old questions in the Humanities in new ways, so the old questions are these. Take a particular cultural object, let's say a blockbuster movie, that's what I like to study. So blockbuster movies - Marvel movies or ET or Terminator 2 - and we ask, well, how is this made not just technically but aesthetically, how are all the parts put together? What kind of camera work is involved? What is the sound design? Why are these big rumbly bass effects involved and how are they affecting my body? And we in the Humanities say, OK, this is how this stuff seems to be working and given the the larger society with where this movie is being made and where it's being enjoyed, what kind of values is it promoting? Is it promoting progressive values? Is it promoting reactionary values? Is it promoting some strange hodgepodge or both? Usually that's the case and very often this work gets done thinking about economics. But in the past, those economics have been largely orthodox and taking up what we call neoclassical ideas about the economy, also even what I would have called orthodox Marxist approaches that begin with an understanding of money as a commodity, as a private exchange relation that comes about in barter relationships between individuals. But as we know from Modern Monetary Theory, this is not actually the case historically or operationally. Instead, money is really a governance project. It's a public utility and it is not a private exchange relationship. Primarily, it can be, but it isn't necessarily and very often when when Humanities scholars and students ask about the social meaning of a blockbuster or a painting or a song, they have that kind of assumption, that orthodox assumption about money in the back of their mind and it leads to certain kinds of judgements. And they get very preoccupied about whether a work of art is a commodity or not a commodity. And in my work, what I'm trying to do is to say, hey, with an MMT's view of money - as a public utility, that can always be organised in another way for full employment, for full employment in the arts. We can begin to understand our culture in a new way. So that's primarily what I'm after. That's just a hint of what I do but it gives you a sense of how I frame this whole relationship between MMT and the Humanities.

Bill: And can you give an example that might be of interest?

Scott: Absolutely. So I'll give two quick examples. So one is, if you study the history of the blockbuster, as I do, you'll notice even at the level of explicit dialogue, they will make all kinds of claims, characters about the national debt, about unemployment. You know, if you look specifically, for example, a big 90s blockbusters like Jurassic Park, Toy Story and The Matrix, there's jokes about nervous jokes about unemployment all over these films, right? And we, as MMT scholars know that unemployment is not a natural effect of the market, but it is a policy choice, right? So we can say that the expressions of the blockbusters are giving voice to an anxiety about the threat of unemployment or actual unemployment that could be otherwise. And in a sense, I would say those blockbusters naturalise unemployment in a way that we would want to push back on and not naturalise. The last example is a kind of more broader - a broader argument that I make about the way we think about aesthetics and culture in general. The way we think about aesthetics and culture typically in our Western societies is we we imagine aesthetics and culture as the opposite of money. Money is this kind of nasty, necessarily brutish, terrible thing that we have to deal with in the marketplace. And aesthetics and culture are those nice, lovely, rich experiences that are going to save us from money in our leisure time or on the weekend, right? And there's a long philosophical tradition that created this impression. And in my work, my argument is to say - no, this is a false division. And it's actually this division is based on on a bad idea of money - that money doesn't have to be horrible. Money is a public utility that could actually help create culture and help create aesthetic experiences, much like it did during the New Deal.

Bill: Right and the last thing I really want to follow up on there is - this infiltration of these dominant economic ideas into fiction and into culture and into media - do you think that that's innocent or do you think that it's part of the sort of way in which the dominant paradigm maintains its position?

Scott: I think the latter but I would say for the most part, unintentionally, right - not consciously, right? Now with I think - I think we're in the middle of a paradigm crisis. And I think MMT is a huge part of throwing into question the dominant economic paradigm now, and I think increasingly dominant media and the writers and creators of that media are going to have to start making decisions - how they want to talk about our economies, in which case it might become intentional. But I think for the most part, if we're talking about my period of analysis of the last 40 years, it's really what we call the neoliberal period - I think it's for the most part, it's innocent in the sense that it's unintentional. But they are reproducing the status quo ideology absolutely, yeah.

Bill: OK, so we better leave it there. Thanks very much and for all of those who are interested in Scott's work, you can just follow up from the links that we provide. And thanks, Scott. That was great.

Scott: Thanks so much.

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