Episode 241 – The MMT Lens with Bill Mitchell

Macro N Cheese – Episode 241
The MMT Lens with Bill Mitchell
September 9, 2023

[00:00:00] Bill Mitchell [Intro/Music]: Degrowth is not an inherent part of MMT, it is not part of the body of knowledge that we now would call MMT. Degrowth is a value system, it is a strategic way of thinking about the future of humanity on the planet.

America will defend their capitalist wealth interests with war at the drop of a hat. And I think if we really start scaling up an aggressive degrowth counter-attack, we will have the American military against us.

[00:01:35] Geoff Ginter [Intro/Music]: Now, let us see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here is another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43] Steven Grumbine: Alright. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today’s guest is none other than Bill Mitchell. And it has been awhile since I have talked to Bill, but this is a particularly important one. Because what we are talking about here is a subject that seems to be outside of the MMT sphere, and yet I do not believe it is.

Bill Mitchell has written on degrowth and its relationship with MMT and his perspective on it. And I just felt like it was really important to hear straight from one of the original developers. Someone who I believe is a real straight shooter, and also as a spirit.

Like most of our listeners at Macro N Cheese, most of us are fed up and looking for real substantive change. I believe Bill is a great voice for that. So without further ado, let me bring on my wonderful guest, Bill Mitchell. Welcome to the show sir.

[00:02:35] Bill Mitchell: Well, thank you Steve. And it is a pleasure to be here again, thank you.

[00:02:41] Grumbine: Absolutely. And I want you to know what a great guy Bill is. I lost track of time. My alarm did not go off. Bedlam at the homestead. And there was Bill, for 20 minutes, waiting for me to join. And he was kind enough to come back, even though I was late. So once again, thank you for being just wonderful. I really appreciate you being so accommodating.

[00:03:03] Mitchell: No worries!

[00:03:06] Grumbine: Let’s talk about this term, ‘degrowth’. I believe, from my vantage point, I have a more nuanced understanding than some do on this. I have spoken to people like Jason Hickel, who I believe, are really coming firmly into the MMT camp. He is a strong proponent for a job guarantee now, not the UBI. And it has just been an amazing transformation, from my perspective, watching him change and become a tremendous ally.

But when I think of MMT, I think of Bill Mitchell. And so I wanted to get your perspective, and again, you wrote extensively on this. I really appreciated you taking the time to put this in writing. But I figure for folks that maybe do not read as much, maybe they would listen to a conversation about degrowth and its relationship with modern monetary theory.

[00:03:56] Mitchell: It’s a complex subject and it is, like all of these things, it is an arena for misperception and fictions. And the relationship between the degrowth movement and MMT, it is quite unclear, in my view, the way it is presented out there. But it is not unclear to me.

And the way I think about it is that MMT is compatible with deep, hard industry pollution and massive growth, if you want it to be. And it is also compatible with a highly sustainable strategy to reduce our reliance on mass consumption, and to divert our economic activity, which we normally think is gross domestic product, to divert that into sustainable products. In other words, radically change the composition of our output.

So, MMT is compatible with both ends of the spectrum really, and it comes back to what I say quite often. I gave a talk yesterday to some financial market players, and the question was asked “Well, is MMT ‘left’… left wing, as in the political spectrum?’… because you are a national figure on the left, an intellectual person on the left.”

And I said, “well, that is your first mistake’, I said it nicely. I said “what my personal politics are is irrelevant to your understanding of MMT, because MMT is politically agnostic in my view.” And I have said it over and over and I was the one that first started saying it, that it is a lens. it is a framework of understanding. it is a way to really appreciate the capacities of a currency issuing government, and the consequences of using that capacity in various ways. But that is it.

It allows us to understand and make tentative predictions about things, but it is not an all encompassing strategy for living. And to articulate a strategy for living, we have to, as I have said many times, impose a set of values or an ideology over that understanding. And so, a right winger could have an MMT understanding, yet articulate policies that are radically different to, say the policies that I would articulate, with the same understanding of the monetary system. So, degrowth is not an inherent part of MMT, that is the point.

[00:07:03] Grumbine: Exactly.

[00:07:03] Mitchell: It is not part of the body of knowledge that we now would call MMT. Degrowth is a value system. It is a strategic way of thinking about the future of humanity on the planet. And it just happens that a lot of the things that would be required to encompass, and implement and execute a degrowth strategy, would require significant investment from the state.

And so the hurdle, apart from all the other hurdles, the hurdle that would be presented and is presented, every time we think about doing anything “green” is, ‘well, how are we going to pay for it?’… ‘that is going to cost a lot, how are we going to do it?’ And so, then the political and public debate reverts back to sound finance, and all the rest of the things that derail progressive agendas.

And so, a person with an MMT understanding would never ask those questions. We ask different questions. And to me, a requirement for us to embrace successfully a degrowth agenda, we really have to continue to educate people in understanding the principles of MMT. Because without the MMT understanding, it is going to be really hard weather, trying to make any progress to completely alter the way in which we conceive and do economic activity. So, that is the link between MMT and degrowth, in my view.

I think an MMT understanding is a necessary and sufficient condition for us to embark on the path of degrowth.

[00:09:16] Grumbine: What you have just said is incredibly powerful, and I hope for folks that are listening to this truly understand. By you saying – and I love the framing and I use your framing all the time – that ‘MMT is a lens’, means if you are a military person and you love going to war, MMT is your baby. You can bomb the world… or you can do great things.

And when I think about books like Reclaiming the State and other works that you have done, in particular, – and of course you are blogging, that brings about so much more clarity – the opportunity for us to take that ‘lens’ and take this neutral understanding of money, and apply that lens to a value system of sustainability.

Which everybody claims they are for, until you tell them ‘we have a value system here we have to impose upon this’, and that means upon the Global North. Which has lived and died on snatching resources from the Global South for profit, and extracting from those countries. That is not MMT. That is a value system that folks like myself wish to do away with.

And so from that standpoint, my value system, which is fostered by an understanding of MMT, makes me think of we were fighting for many things that showed us that we could do things without a profit motive. We could scale down some of the excesses. We could choose to live a good quality life, without making everything – ‘basic needs for profit’.

All of which are value systems. All of those are values, when put up against the MMT lens – that you and the development team have done so much work in providing us with a rich body of work to pull from – allows us to impose that value system through the lens of MMT. And perhaps save society from itself, as we go through what looks to be a tremendously violent crisis. A climate crisis that I do not believe anybody that has done any reading on the subject, would deny is happening before our very eyes.

Bill, I know that you are an MMT economist, but you have a value system as well, and you have written about these things extensively. When you impose your value system on this, the idea of taking the Global South and shifting that production to them, to allow them to survive and to catch up, while taking away some of the excesses of the Global North, I do not see how that is a tremendously wrong position to take.

[00:11:53] Mitchell: I think in what you just said, you mentioned the word ‘profit’. I have always been on the left, and during the 1970s, in that era the early ’70s, when I was sort of coming of age, if you like, the big debates were American imperialism. The Vietnam War was featured heavily in that. Colonialism, the ravaging of third world countries. Even that word ‘third world’ is a loaded term. And the groups that I was moving in, as a student and after, we would say ‘yeah, we are socialists and we have to overthrow capitalism!’ And we were extremely active in that endeavor, but I do not think we fully understood things at that time. We were too young.

Young people are great and innovative, but they have not learned all that much. Their enthusiasm is great, but they need time to understand things. But the point that we are now at, I think, is that the ecological system is going to precipitate the system change that we could not, as student radicals in the 1970s.

In that era – even back into the sixties with the French riots and the Kent State riots in the US, and all of the student unrest all around the world, as my generation came to understand that capitalism was letting us down. That protest movement… we made gains, of course. There was massive change in the way we understood the role of women and race and things like that, but in general, our aim was to overthrow capitalism. And we failed. It was a more powerful entity than we were.

But when I think of ‘degrowth’ and you analyze the technical aspects of it, what does it mean? It means less energy used, supply and all the rest of the stuff, and we can articulate that if you like. But the ultimate conclusion – and I am in the process of researching and putting notes together for a book on this topic – because when you come down to it after working on the idea and understanding it, reading all the literature and sussing out your own feelings about it, ultimately the question I come down to is ‘well, what is the problem?’

And the problem is that our entire system of allocation of economic resources and economic activity, is really motivated by capitalist profit. That is the motivation. We make all of these decisions based upon private profit, and that is incredibly powerful as an enemy. And I am not saying it is a great thing, I think it is a terrible thing. And the only way I think we are going to be able to jump the hurdle and move to a progressive degrowth sustainable future, is by abandoning the profit motive.

Now then you ask me, ‘is that going to happen?’ And that is where I get very gloomy, and I go back to my student days, and we tried to do it then. And it resonates with what you just said about a ‘violent change’. And I am still sketching this out in my mind, but I think that the degrowth agenda is not going to come about with greeny centering politics and mildly restraining some things in a regulative framework or something.

I think that we are approaching a point where there are so many fault lines in our society, interacting with the fault lines in the ecology. And there are so many powerful vested forces that are resisting all of those fault lines for their own profit, that we are into a very grim future. That is my current position. A violent future.

[00:16:48] Grumbine: It is absolutely terrifying.

[00:16:50] Mitchell: I think America, for example, and I do not want to put down Americans, but the American state is the most martial state in the world. Despite it saying always it is for peace and unity, it is the one that wages the most wars of any country. Russia is an evil beast in that sense, but America is a scale above that.

And you see the way the Americans behave towards the Gulf. And the Gulf are not angels, but America will defend their capitalist wealth interests with war, at the drop of a hat. And I think if we really start scaling up an aggressive degrowth counter-attack, we will have the American military against us. And I just cannot see a way around that yet.

I am still thinking about it, whether there are pathways that we could take, that do not involve conflict. The other problem, of course, I have given talks on this problem, is that social change is typically evolutionary. It is slow. Think about the women’s movement, how long it really took, from the 1920s through to the 1970s, for women to cajole society into accepting a different role for them, and different opportunities, and using their capacities in different ways.

So, social change takes a really long time, and it probably should because it is complex… but climate change is not. And I think the evidence is increasing that it is not slow changing, the tipping points have probably already passed. So I do not think we have got time, from an ecological point of view. Even if we could achieve the relevant social change and enter a ‘non mass consumption, service oriented, people first’ future, that will take time, even if it was possible.

The latest research on ‘desertification’ – it is a hard word to say, but it means that former productive arable lands become deserts because of global warming – shows there is strong evidence that the food bowls of Europe are going to become deserts and unproductive very soon, because the flora cannot adapt quick enough, in a biological sense, to the changing temperatures.

Now, how are those food bowls going to be replaced?… The obvious answer is by exploiting other food bowls. So, who currently uses the other food bowls?… Other people do.

So you can easily envisage a battle over shrinking food bowls in the world. And that battle will be obviously won, in the short run, by those with the most military might. And it is not going to be poor nations in Africa or South America, it is going to be wealthy nations in North America and continental Europe. So these are the sort of things that I am trying to work through and think about.

[00:20:26] Grumbine: I drove through Northern Virginia and it was filled with these massive ‘military-industrial complex’ buildings, and all the different military contractors… I am looking at that and saying, ‘my God, that is what we are up against’.

And I had spoken with Michael Hudson a while back and he said, “you have the banks too, do not forget them, they are not interested in saving humanity, they are interested in their own wealth, that is it.”

It is so massive, so depressing, and I do not know if humanity is fit to survive without hope, Bill. I do not know how to be a parent without hope. I do not know how to be an activist without hope. For me, at this moment, the only thing that I can see, is that I believe the insights of MMT will allow a rational human being to make decisions that allow us to do whatever it takes to survive. That is my hope.

[00:21:34] Mitchell: I agree with you… I am not enunciating here a ‘give up ‘strategy. That is definitely not my game, and as an educator and as a public figure, intellectual figure, I see my role as continually trying to engender knowledge that will give people alternatives. I do not advocate we just ‘lie down and take it’, but as an academic, as a researcher, I have to look at the evidence.

And here is an important thing I think – and it took me a long time as a person to understand this – that I used to be depressed all the time because I was researching labor markets and poverty and developing countries, and I’d always feel guilty that I had a job. I have been well paid in my life as an academic. I had a secure job, have a secure job. I was able to transit from a working class background to a middle class background through education. So I used to always feel guilty about that, that there was all this poverty around me, and why was I not poor?

And it took me a long time to really take it easy on myself, in a way, to not flagellate over what I could not control. That I had a responsibility to those that I care about, to be kind and generous. And to be happy, as a human condition. And to enjoy the sunlight and the beach. And to do everything I could, within my own micro realm, to be true to values. So Louisa and I now have a sustainable residence. We grow food. We have a very energy-efficient house. We are frugal. And so we are not involved in mass consumption and every spending decision is based upon sustainability.

So, in a micro way, we are really trying to live a degrowth agenda, because ultimately, you can only do what you can control. So, that is on a personal level. I have great hope that I can continue to educate people around me to live a life that is attempting, as far as I can, to be sustainable, within reason. But as an academic, I go to work each day and I sit in my office and I say “hell, how’s this going to work out on an aggregate scale?”… and I think that is an important difference.

We have to keep personal hope in our own motivations. Our own behaviors. Our own way of treating each other. And spreading the knowledge, and educating, and being active and trying to recruit as many people (as possible) to a sustainable lifestyle.

But as an intellectual, in my job, I know it is a mountain we have to climb.

[00:25:12] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Twitch Rokfin, and Instagram.

[00:26:03] Grumbine: People vacillate between whether or not the state is more powerful, or the corporation. And all evidence would suggest that the corporation is more powerful. I do not believe it has to be that, but at least that is what it seems like. What do you suppose we could do, if anything, to change that?

Because I understand that the state is the currency issuer, and without the currency, there is no markets. Without the markets, there is no profit. I am at a loss to some degree, knowing what I know within the MMT realm. The state could change this if it wanted to, and I think this goes back to your book Reclaiming the State…

Why do we allow corporations to run our lives like this?

Is this just the animus of capitalism, or is it something else?

Why is that the way it is?

[00:27:03] Mitchell: Well, that is what Reclaiming the State was about. There were major turning points, in relatively recent history, where this ‘shift’ occurred. Where the corporations and the wealthy reconfigured the state for their own ends. Now, they ran a very successful campaign, starting in the early ’70s.

I think in the past we had already talked about the Powell Manifesto… Lewis Powell’s very powerful strategy. And that came about because from the end of the Second World War through to the early ’70s, social democratic politics was not ‘taming’, so much, but let us use the word ‘taming’ capitalism. And what I mean by that is, that the broad political landscape had shifted. Where people were demanding rights of jobs, and social security safety nets, and public education, and public transport and public health. And that was dispensed or implemented in various ways, in various countries.

So, the Scandinavian countries were always much more generous than the Anglo speaking countries. And countries like New Zealand and Australia and Britain were much more generous than the United States, for various reasons. But broadly, all of the countries of the world were following this social democratic idea. And what did we see?

We saw real wages increasing with productivity. We saw strong productivity growth. We saw reductions in income and wealth inequalities. We saw much more social mobility. I certainly, as a young person, benefited from being able, through public education and right through to university, to traverse from working class to middle class. And there was a much broader understanding that we were able to share the wealth that the economic system was generating.

Now that did not suit the elites, of course. They got sick of that “sharing” arrangement, and that led to a major counter-attack in the early ’70s. The Powell Manifesto was articulating the American context, a strategy for reclaiming their power, that was only slightly dissipated by the sharing understandings under social democracies. Capitalism was still generating spectacular wealth for people.

When I say we were ‘reducing inequalities’, it was only marginally, but there was a counter-attack. And the way in which that counter-attack reconfigured the state to serve its own interests more fully, to take control of the media, to infiltrate the education system… was particularly successful.

And with it, came a public indoctrination program that we were stupid enough to fall for. And ultimately, the corporations only really had power because we allowed them, and we foster that power as consumers and workers. And so, we have been bought off by big cars, big garages, boats, gadgets, iPhones, and all the rest of the stuff that we think is advancing our wellbeing. And that keeps us quiet and compliant.

And slowly but surely, that process kept running into limits, so it had to be ramped up. And now what we are seeing in this ‘latter’ – some people are calling it neo feudalism, I do not like that term but it is this control by corporations – not, in their view, making enough.

The greedy bastards.

So, neoliberalism is an ongoing reconfiguration, and this is the most interesting part of it, in my view, that, that process is now to extract even more for the elites. It is now starting to eat up the middle class, and it was the middle class that was their bastion, because that was the mass consumption class. And that stopped trade unions in their tracks. And stopped worker movements and all the rest of it.

So drip feed a bit of mass consumption to the middle class and make them feel as though they have hope, and having a happy life in their big houses, and all the rest of it. Well, that process is now evolving because it does not deliver enough wealth to the top end of town. And as a consequence, what you are seeing is the gig economy and the privatization era and all of that stuff. The reduction in workplace security and conditions of work, and inability to get adequate wages and income growth.

That is all eating into the middle class. And ultimately, once capital eats into the middle class, then we are going to be a lot of angry people. There is going to be growing social instability again, like there was in the late 19th century. That really threatened the hegemony of capital.

So, I think that is where we are heading at the moment, and I think the dynamic is there for us to reengage with each other as a solidaristic movement. Which is akin to the way in which the trade unions formed, in the second half of the 19th century, as a reaction to the terrible conditions that industrial capital was inflicting on workers in the spinning mills and the early factories. And I think we are headed back to that oppression. And there was a reason why trade unions and welfare states formed at the end of the 19th century, and it was because things got too bleak.

And I think that we are seeing a cycle. We went through a period where the early era of industrial capitalism was terrible for workers. Eventually it got so terrible that they rebelled and threatened capital. And so capital had to concede, and that is when we had the social democratic era. And then capital retaliated again, and got smart with new strategies.

And we have seen a retrenchment of a lot of the welfare gains and industrial gains, that workers made in that post-war period of social democracy. And that is eating into the middle class again now. And I think conditions will get more and more severe for workers. And eventually it will be become intolerable, and they will rebel again, and the political process will have to evolve again.

But, overlying all that is this bloody climate disaster, and I just do not how all of that interacts. I am thinking about that at the moment, and I will be writing about that soon.

[00:35:03] Grumbine: With great power, comes great responsibility. And I think about people that understand MMT… that knowledge, is power.

And when you understand how that system goes, I believe if you know this stuff and you choose to be selfish and focus on wealth and looking at aggregates instead of understanding the way the stratification goes, and know that just because the macro hides the stratification losses of people drowning at the bottom, especially as we are about to have a student debt tsunami slam through, in the United States in particular, we are about to see something brutal sweep through here. That is what steals my hope is knowing people that know MMT, but still focus on very selfish things.

It has really caused me to get very ill at times, and I just have to go back to trying to do my best. And there is so many times where I just wanted to walk away, because for every word I utter, there is 20 words to make it go away. And I think about the experts that we bring in here and the work we are doing, and it is meaningless if change does not follow.

Short of revolution, I do not see a path forward. And I do not know how to do anything at this point, because the propaganda machines and the selfishness of those who are seeking wealth at all costs, is just so repulsive and repugnant to me.

I get the hopelessness. I get that feeling of ‘my God, what do we do?’

Help me find some hope because it really is a kick in the stomach, every day I wake up to realize that nothing is changing, things are getting worse.

[00:36:48] Mitchell: I do not have a couch that you can lie on Steve. It is not my game, so I cannot give you any personal advice.

[00:36:57] Grumbine: Sure.

[00:36:59] Mitchell: I think we all share those frustrations in different ways, with different personal costs. But, I go back to what I said before, ‘you have got to do everything you can in your personal life’, because otherwise, as you say, you are a fraud. If you spout this stuff in public forums and then do exactly the opposite in your personal life, well that is not much good.

You said it, ‘knowledge is everything’ and I have always stood by that. I think that the reason why the people are not solid and adopting solidaristic strategies like they did in the late 19th century that really led to the formation of trade union movements, is because of ignorance. That is my view.

We have been so cajoled by the media machines, Fox News and Sky News, and all these other media outlets. And that is been taken to a high art form. it is sometimes extremely hard to work out whether what you are listening to is fact, or just made up. I do not even watch those broadcasts. We are just under a constant barrage of misinformation and reinforcing the fiction.

So I do not blame the individual, I think that anybody can succumb to that. And most people do not have the benefit that I have, of sitting in a library office in front of an information system and being able to extract data all the time. Most people are too busy making their ends meet, and their jobs do not allow them that. It is lucky that I have that sort of job. So I do not blame the individuals, but the problem is ignorance.

I gave a talk yesterday to these people that are well heeled, and most of them have been quite well educated, probably through end of university. But not downtrodden by any means. And I asked them a few questions to begin, and of course, they all got the answers wrong. Massive ignorance. And so, I think where you find personal meaning – and here I have you on the couch –

[00:39:34] Grumbine: Yes.

[00:39:36] Mitchell: is in understanding your role as a part of the ‘educative transmission process’.

And that is what motivates me on a daily basis, that if I can help even one extra person, every day, understand something, that will then change the questions that they ask and the options that they perceive.

Well then, there is a great song by an iconic Australian singer “From Small Things, Big Things Grow”, it is a beautiful song, it is about indigenous struggles, but from small things, a step at a time. The problem is too large if you try to deal with it in aggregate.

[00:40:24] Grumbine: Indeed.

[00:40:26] Mitchell: The only way we could see a way forward to have an individual contribution, which gives us meaning as individuals, and gives us a sense that we are doing something positive and meaningful, is to try to get your next door neighbor, and then the next door neighbor, and then so on and so forth, to make the change and to start asking different questions.

And maybe it is too late and it is quite possible the climate degradation is outpacing us by far, but that is the only way, I can conceive, of staying afloat.

[00:41:09] Grumbine: On the positive side, our team at Real Progressives came together – they know that Steve does not see Macro N Cheese as infotainment, they know that I see this as the playbook- so they decided that they were going to create a zoom meeting on Tuesday nights, after each Macro N Cheese, and they would listen in 15 minute increments collectively, and discuss it collectively. And it started off with 30 people, and then 40ish people, and it just keeps growing.

And this is something completely led by others, and they are running it, and it is just been an amazing thing. So, we are educating people. People are learning this stuff and listening. Other people are starting to feel empowered to take this mission further.

[00:42:04] Mitchell: I was talking to a guy yesterday and he is quite well known in financial markets. He is now an MMTer and he is a very influential character. And he told me yesterday, his podcast now has over 40,000 listeners.

[00:42:23] Grumbine: Wow.

[00:42:23] Mitchell: Well, 40,000 in a weekly podcast in Australia, given the population of 26 million, that is not bad. And if you think back – we might have joked about this before – I remember Warren and Randy and I, when all of this started in mid ’90s, we would joke that we would celebrate when we could not count the number of MMT’ers on one hand anymore.

So think about, that in 27 or 28 years, we have got podcasts, that I have nothing to do with by the way, the guy just reads my words, he has got 40,000 people every week. You have your team. There are groups all around the world, for better or for worse, talking about these things. So the green shoots are cropping up everywhere, and it is now completely beyond anything that Warren and I thought of, originally.

So you have to have hope that a critical mass is emerging, but whether that is going to emerge quick enough, I do not know… I doubt it. But you have to do the best you can. And I think your team are doing the best you can and it is wonderful work. And there is other groups all around the world doing what they think (helps) .

I am about to go back to work in Japan again for three months, and there is a huge MMT group in Japan now. And we are running a big symposium in Tokyo, with the politicians in November. There will be a lot of the Parliament members there. These things were inconceivable 25 years ago. So, I have adopted the view that I will just be relentless as long as I can string two words together, and eventually, like all people as they get old, my mind will give up, I guess.

And I will just keep at it until that happens. And when I start writing blog posts and giving talks where I become incoherent, then I hope someone tells me I am incoherent and I will fade into the ether. But, we all have to continue to be as constructive and relentless as possible, and take the small little wins as they occur.

Each new person you meet – a woman came up to me yesterday at a function that I was talking at and said, “oh God, I have read your book now, it is changed the way I think.” “Well, that is great” I say. Contribution for the day, acknowledged. Thank you. And I think that is what has to motivate all people who are wanting to see a better world.

Whether we will get there or not, I do not know… and it is pretty grim. It is a mountain, as I said, to climb and maybe we wll never see what the peak is. We are up against powerful enemies. But, there was a reason trade unions formed in the late 19th century, and that gives me hope that human society has the capacity to evolve.

On the other hand, as an academic, I do understand that human civilizations collapse, history tells us that. The Roman Empire collapsed, and all the conditions for a collapse in human society, and our current existence, are there.

That is the academic in me speaking. And how that evolves, we will see.

[00:45:59] Grumbine: Well, this has been incredibly thought provoking. I already have grim views, so some of this confirmed that, but you did give hope in there. And I appreciate you offering me up five seconds of couch time, to appreciate that.

Bill, you are going to Japan here again, and you are writing a book. But what else do you have going on, just so everybody can keep up with your stuff?

[00:46:26] Mitchell: I am just doing the same thing. I am going back to work at Kyoto University again, where I have got a great research group now, I am part of. It is not my group, but I am part of it. We are doing a lot of work on the future of Japan. it is leading the way, in a lot of ways, in having to confront some of these challenges, before other nations.

I am just relentless. You just have to keep at it, and I will keep doing that until I become incoherent. Some people think I am already incoherent. But I am lucky that I have a job that I do not have a bad back, so I cannot be a manual worker.

A lot of manual workers – all of this stuff that governments are trying to push on workers to increase the retirement age where you can get a public pension – that is so inequitous for manual workers. They just cannot work hard, late into their lives. So, I am really lucky that I can work forever, until my mind gives up, and I celebrate that every day and I feel lucky. And so with that, personal luck, to me, becomes a responsibility to be relentless.

And that is what I am doing.

[00:47:43] Grumbine: Amen.

Alright, with that, I want to thank my guest Bill Mitchell.

Bill, as always, thank you so much for taking the time to be with me.

[00:47:49] Mitchell: No worries.

[00:47:50] Grumbine: We are a nonprofit that survives on your donations, so please keep donating.

I am Steve Grumbine, the host… and guest Bill Mitchell…

Macro N Cheese. We are outta here.

[00:48:09] End Credits: Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.