Episode 356 – Scotland’s Economic Suicide Pact? with William Thomson

Steve Grumbine:
00:00:42

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. My guest today is from Scotland. His name is William Thomson.

He’s a political economist and has worked for almost a decade in the financial services sector in London, holding positions at the British Bankers Association and the Council of Mortgage Lenders. William has a Master of Science in the Green Economy and a Master of Economics of Sustainability based in Dunblane.

William writes articles on economics in various publications including the National, Brave New Europe, and the Scottish Left Review. He hosts the Scotonomics podcast and curates Scotland’s Economics Festival.

And he wrote a paper, co-wrote a paper with our friend Dirk Ehnts that we’re going to be discussing today.

And the title of that paper is Undermining Economic Resilience: the Economic Impact of Adopting the European Union’s Stability and Growth Pact in an Independent Scotland and Introducing Scotland’s Sectoral Balances. This is exciting to me.

I mean, we talked to various economists and various political figures and various journalists and authors all around the world.

And I think it’s really important, as we assess our own country and assess the things that are going on within our own worlds, wherever you reside, okay? That we understand the struggle. Because regardless of where you are, all of our struggles are interconnected.

There are different rules. There are different actors. There are different geopolitical angles. But at the end of the day, all of our struggles are connected.

And the one unifying factor in most of this, aside from hopefully a fight against the capitalist predatory class, is also an understanding of the ledgers that back the monetary system and understand how money is created, where its origins are, and who has the power. So with that, it’s good to hear from Scotland because Scotland is still part of the UK and I think it would like to be independent.

At least a lot of folks would like that. And I think Will is one of them. So without further ado, let me bring on my guest, Will Thomson. Welcome to the show, sir.

Will Thomson:
00:02:56

Thanks so much, Steve. It’s nice to talk to you.

Steve Grumbine:
00:03:00

Absolutely. You guys wrote a great paper here. I mean, I love Dirk, and this is our first time getting to talk on the podcast.

So for folks that haven’t really had a chance to get to know you. Why don’t you introduce yourself to the Macro N Cheese community?

Will Thomson:
00:03:16

This is always the hardest thing to talk about, isn’t it? It’s yourself. Well, I studied economics at university in Scotland in the 1990s.

We’d got rid of every other form of economics apart from neoclassical economics.

So when I did my degree in Dundee University, it was solidly neoclassical, but I didn’t know that it was neoclassical because I wasn’t aware of any other school of economics. I just thought we were learning economics.

And I don’t think that’s changed for the vast majority of people in most of our Western democracies who are completely unaware that there are very different thoughts, ideas, assumptions that underpin other schools of economics. Most people still think, as I did back in the 1990s, that economics is economics.

It’s underpinned by things that you can’t really argue against, you know, like supply and demand curves, that people will act on their own self-interest. All of these things kind of seem self-evident and it was really simple to follow that.

So I studied economics, secondary school, and then in the first year at university and then I remember doing a paper on price and elasticity. And the example I used was drugs.

And Dundee, which is the fourth biggest city in Scotland, has always had for maybe 40, 50 years real serious problems around drug abuse, drug addiction. And I wanted to use what I was learning at university to help me understand these problems.

So I did an essay talking about how it doesn’t really matter what the price of something is when you’re addicted to it. So how do we tackle these problems?

And I remember my lecturer saying to me, “This is okay, but this is just not a subject or a topic that we would want to cover in economics.” And I can remember just feeling like someone had just, you know, just punched me in the face.

And I said, “Well, but that’s why I want to understand economics.” And he said, “You just won’t get to those answers studying economics.”

So I very quickly, in my second year dropped economics and tried to find something that would help me better understand the problems that were going on.

So I really wanted to study economics because I thought it was a way of seeing the world that would help the issues that I could see from a real progressive, you know, social consciousness. And I was turned off economics for maybe 15 years until the Scottish [independence] referendum in 2014.

And I came back to it and I thought, how does a better understanding of economics point me to decide whether or not Scotland should be an independent nation or not? And this is when I started reading, getting into politics and also into economics.

And when I started reading a lot of the left-wing commentary around our economy, I started to realize that money was something that we didn’t really understand.

And since that moment, that kind of reawakening of my political and economic understanding, which was 10 years ago, I’ve started to really concentrate on how I can help other people. Because so many people are either on this kind of journey from ignorance to understanding, or how can I explain and understand myself even better?

So this is what I’ve been doing over the last five years by studying a Green Economy Masters and then a Economics of Sustainability, setting up Scotonomics, running a festival of economics, trying to do as many of these types of interviews, writing articles as I can, because I feel that there’s an understanding that we can come to and we have a clearer idea of the options available to governments and to other institutions.

Steve Grumbine:
00:06:41

I want to just tack on, you said something really, I think, very important for folks to zero in on, and that is that when you’re ignorant of economics and you’re also looking at political economy, your political economy will be shaded by your lack of understanding of economics. Because the thing that makes such common sense isn’t really common sense at all.

It’s oftentimes a misunderstanding or an outright lie, as much of neoclassical economics tends to be.

But if your brain has been clouded with false-scarcity narratives and fake ideas about how money comes to be, and fake ideas about “printing money,” or fake ideas about a whole host of things, the limits to your political economy, to your imagination, to your willingness to fight for better, is dumbed down to the point of anemic.

Will Thomson:
00:07:37

I agree completely.

Steve Grumbine:
00:07:39

And so when I heard you saying that, I was like, wow, okay, you know, the two do work hand in glove, right? Your ignorance of economics creates a poor political economy and your poor political economy creates bad economics.

Until we dislodge them, people are just trapped in a world of false narratives and really misery.

Will Thomson:
00:07:59

Absolutely. And I really like Stephanie Kelton’s idea of learned helplessness. And I think this is exactly where we are as a broad society.

But specifically, when I’m having conversations with a lot of people in the climate movement, I talk about learned helplessness.

And I wrote a paper a few months ago which tried to go out to the climate movement and say, “Look, there’s a lens that you can use, which is a modern monetary theory lens that will actually support you in your understanding of what the state can do right now.”

Because I did a small literature review and just found that almost 50% of the time when people were talking about solutions, they would mention some kind of economics.

And most of the time they’re constrained by this idea that, “We have to tax someone to pay for something,” or, “It has to be the rich governments that give money to the poor governments.” And I think this just really stymies the opportunity for change within so many of our areas within society that we think are super important.

And it does all come back to this. Clearly, if we better understand the role of money within our governments and within our society, we can achieve so much more.

And you know, that’s really what I’ve been doing for the last year. The paper that we’re going to focus on is very similar as to say, “Well, actually if a government does view money differently, it can do so much more.”

Steve Grumbine:
00:09:20

One of the things we talked about offline that I would like to get you to say online here, which I think is really powerful. You know, when I started learning MMT, modern monetary theory, for folks that are just tuning in, maybe have never heard of this before, one of the things that I found myself doing was just hyper focused on the fact that I was coming to this bemused, if you will, that so much of the battles between the duopoly, the two parties in the United States, so much of the conversation stemmed around, “You’re wasting my hard earned tax dollars,” and “Hey, you want to raise taxes for me to blah, blah, blah.” And so everything died on the hill of how you’re going to pay for it.

And that moment of awakening that I had was very brief because then I started realizing, to a lot of MMT’ers chagrin, that without having an understanding of political economy, without having a not this neutral ledgers, “Hey, you know, it’s just this ledgers thing.” Until you had something, you end up with Ronald Reagan, you know, and the Cold War, you end up with this Genocide Joe funding Gaza slaughter.

You have to have a political compass, you have to have a guidepost. And I am very much a socialist in some way, shape or form, whatever that means.

I am definitely more on the eco side because I understand the ecological side of things, which is another thing that I’m excited to talk to you about today.

But you made the great point offline that if we don’t have a good political economy guiding these neutral ledgers, that it’s not enough to just know ledgers, we’ve got to have the other side too. You can’t clap with one hand, you have to have two hands to clap. And I feel like that was vital. And I get a lot of pushback, folks.

[Yeah] I mean, an insane amount of pushback within the community even, when I try and bring this stuff up. And my political economy is one that I fight for the working class. I fight for the little guy, not for a bunch of Wall Street traders.

I’m not going to J.P. Morgan to give a talk. And I think that those that do, maybe are not necessarily on Team Working Class.

I think maybe they are part of the bourgeoisie and part of the oppressors. So for me, this political economy thing is guided 100% by my understanding of MMT. You came into this as an ecological guy.

I mean, MMT is a great lens, but it’s insufficient. It’s not a theory of everything like Bill Mitchell says.

Will Thomson:
00:11:53

I think it’s really important. And I would say the vast majority of people who I know support MMT in the UK and also a little bit wider in the States and into Europe.

See, MMT is a really useful lens to do something progressive. And I always love conversations with people who say, to me, “No, no, MMT is just a lens. It’s just a description of how the economy works.”

And I think this narrative is really strong within the MMT community. And in no way am I saying that’s wrong. I’m just saying that I disagree with it.

And I was at the Levy Summer School just north of New York in June, and we had a wonderful presentation. It was saying that we really need to look at MMT like other schools view their lens. For what is the point?

Why are we all here talking about how the economy works and how money works? [Yes] We all need to come up and see. An MMT lens without it being underpinned by a philosophical position is pointless. And it was really powerful.

It was Randy Wray who made this presentation.

Steve Grumbine:
00:12:58

I love him.

Will Thomson:
00:12:59

Straight away, three of the hands from the people who he’d spent 25 years teaching all shot up in the air. And they were saying, “Hold on, can we just check? Did you say what we just think that you said? And what?” And it’s online.
I would recommend, if everyone hasn’t read it, go to the Levy Institute and read that. It’s from about June and it’s Randy’s take. And I think it’s probably the most important bit of MMT literature that will come out this year.

And I think it was saying to the movement, “These simple phrases are all really useful and the lens is great, but unless we understand the political economy and the ideology behind MMT, it’s useless.” So it’s really, really powerful.

And it just spoke to everything that I believed about MMT because I see it as one of the maybe three main lenses on how I see the economy.

You know, that sits alongside institutional economics, ecological economics, and then MMT, but within a wider, heterodox understanding of the economy that touches on feminist, political economy, some Marxism, but we need to just take a step back and see if you’re looking through a few lenses, you’re going to have a slightly different view and you’re going to be influenced by all these other schools.

Steve Grumbine:
00:14:08

Yes.

Will Thomson:
00:14:09

So you just need to accept that and run with it. You know, of all the economics books I’ve read, probably my favorite is a book called Butterfly Economics by Paul Ormerod, an English economist.

It’s got nothing to do with money, nothing to do with MMT, but it’s fundamentally one of the most important books that I’ve read, and I use that every day because it talks about how we are socially influenced when we’re making decisions, and we need to understand this wider, heterodox framing of our economy. And that’s why I call myself a political economist, first of all. But if anyone says to me, “You know, and what particular area do you concentrate?”

I’ll say, “Ecological economics or modern monetary theory.” I’m not scared by those titles, but I think political economy really speaks to a much wider understanding of our economy and our society.

Steve Grumbine:
00:14:57

Yes.

You know, it’s funny you say that, because I had, you know, in scheduling all my interviews here for Macro N Cheese, I had been turned on to a feminist economist. And ironically, her book is called Deficit.

Okay, not Deficit Myth, but Deficit and it’s how feminist economics can change, you know, on and on and on. And her name is Emma Holton, and we will be talking with her sometime in December.

I’m not exactly sure what the date is offhand, but she’s going to be coming onto the show. And interestingly enough, Randy Wray, he’s our last interview here prior to you. So this is exciting. A lot of good synergies coming up here.

All right, let’s go ahead and pivot here, folks. You heard it from Will. And you heard it from me. You know, ledgers without political economy is kind of like clapping with one hand, okay?

So this paper you and Dirk Ehnts wrote: fascinating paper.

It starts out with a lot of bullets, and I would recommend reading the full 30 [pages], but if you’re not given to reading the full 30, some of the really, really Important high points are broken out in this elongated executive summary. I think it’s fantastic. I think it’s great.

Will Thomson:
00:16:06

Thank you.

Steve Grumbine:
00:16:07

Let’s start first off with how did you hook up with Dirk, who has been a guest on the show many times. And what was the genesis of writing this paper to start with?

Will Thomson:
00:16:16

Well, I interviewed Dirk on Scotonomics when we started our podcast a few years ago because there’s not many European MMT economists.

And I got pally with Dirk and then I started doing my Economics of Sustainability degree at Torrens University and Dirk was one of the lecturers, but it was more like, “Hey, Dirk, what are you doing here?” You know, so it was really nice to see him. And we got chatting and I said to him what I wanted to do, which I’ll go into detail.

And he said, well, I’d love to support you on that. That fits very well where we are.

And I said, you know, I need your kind of gravitas because we’re talking about the European Union and the impacts of some of the decisions if Scotland did move towards the European Union, where it became independent. And Dirk said he was happy to help.

So we were really lucky we got him just before he got his job at the European Parliament, which he’s working on now.

Took us about six months to write the paper and I thought it would take us then a month to publish it, but it takes a lot longer because things move so quickly and then you’re going back and you’re checking.

And I also wanted to make sure that, you know, we sent it out to a fairly broad group of left-wing economists to get their take on it as well, because I think it had to be really important. It’s not an MMT paper, but it talks to so many MMT talking points.

It was really important that we felt like we had something that could have been read and understood much more broadly across the progressive economic space.

Steve Grumbine:
00:17:40

This is totally a sidebar, but I want to get right back to it. You know, when Bill Mitchell, Randy Wray and Martin Watts put out the MMT textbook, it was just called Macroeconomics, because that’s what it is.

Will Thomson:
00:17:53

Absolutely.

Steve Grumbine:
00:17:54

I just found that to be quite interesting. So you say it’s not specifically. Well, you know what? It kind of is, isn’t it? It’s still macroeconomics.

Will Thomson:
00:18:02

I’m just thinking about that paper. I don’t even know if we see monetary theory in the paper. It’s so kind of like, well, we either did or we didn’t.

There was no decision to include it or not include it. So I’m going to just check to see if we did say that. But anyone who reads it who’s influenced by MMT will see most of the talking points there.

Steve Grumbine:
00:18:20

There are two instances of MMT and guess where they are: in the references section referencing other works.

Will Thomson:
00:18:28

So, yeah, there you are.

Steve Grumbine:
00:18:31

Okay, so let’s go ahead and get started here. Back to the paper. You’ve given us the modus operandi for how you hooked up with Dirk and so forth. Let’s go in.

Obviously, your point of this is focusing on an independent Scotland, like everything else is going to be ancillary to that. That is the primary purpose of a lot of your work here as well.

And your very first bullet here is an independent Scotland has all the necessary resources, skills and institutional capacity to enable its citizens to prosper. And we can go from there man.

Will Thomson:
00:19:06

Well, I think it’s important for the audience to understand who was our audience of this paper.

We generally wrote it so that everyone could understand it and could start having a wider understanding of some of the decisions or the path dependency that was already being created. But our target very much was the Scottish government and the Scottish Civil Service.

And it was to say to them, you’ve got a published economic plan for what will happen on the lead up to when Scotland becomes independent and then what we’ll do in the first five or 10 years. And no one has looked at this in detail.

So what we’re going to do is we’re going to take one section of that, which is the decision to align with the European Union’s Stability and Growth pact, which is their fiscal rules, and we’re going to spend a year and we’re going to look at that and we’re going to see, well, what impact would that have? And we are still the only paper that’s looked at that in detail.

And there’s maybe 15, 20 things that you could look at for the economic direction that the Scottish government are taking and you can look at in detail. And that’s what we decided to do.

And then we’ve sent it to the Scottish government and we’ve said, “[Here’s a] thoroughly strong academic bit of work that says this would be a terrible decision. Can you tell us why we’re wrong?” And that was really our principal aim.

And we’ve had quite a bit of engagement so far from the Scottish government, from this. But it is really to say, “We support independence and that’s why that first point is so important. But this is completely the wrong route.”

And it’s really important because papers like this can so easily be picked up from the other side, which we call the Unionist side, the people who want to retain Scotland as part of the United Kingdom. And saying, “An academic paper completely demolishes the idea that Scotland could be independent.” And that’s not what the paper’s saying.

It’s saying that the direction that we are taking and the path dependency that the Scottish government is planning will undermine independence. And that’s what our principal point was in the paper.

Steve Grumbine:
00:21:03

Let me ask you a question.

You know, a lot of colonial projects, and let’s be fair, Scotland is, I don’t know whether you would call it a colonial project or not, but it’s definitely under the thumb of the UK. I’ve not seen too many of the caretakers of colonies be very open to independence of any variety.

So, you know, I’m a little bit more revolutionary than a lot of the United States folks that frequent us. But in Scotland, I mean, let’s be fair, you’re calling for independence, period. And that comes with a lot of strings, right?

That comes with a lot of conversation angles because you may want independence, but somebody’s either got a grant it or you’ve got to take it. So how does an independent Scotland come to be?

Will Thomson:
00:21:51

Yeah, well, that’s a really interesting question and it is something I’m going to sidestep deliberately because that is the politics of it. And what was really important for us when we were writing this paper was to say the assumption is Scotland becomes independent.

Steve Grumbine:
00:22:06

Ah, okay.

Will Thomson:
00:22:07

Because we’re at the point where we’re saying to people we need to argue for it to be a benefit or it’s not our job to see how this comes about. For your audience, Scotland was granted independence referendum when support for independence was about 30%.

And we lost that independence referendum 45% to 55% 10 years ago.

And at the time, our leader of the independence movement, Alex Salmond, said “This is a once in a generation referendum,” which was taken pretty much out of context by the mainstream media in the UK to say, “Well, there can’t be another referendum in a generation,” you know, because someone on the Left said something, right? It had to be true and you had to be held to it.

So this was a huge issue, especially after Brexit, because Scotland voted 65% to remain while the rest of the UK, well, England and Wales voted to leave, but Scotland had to leave the European Union even though a big majority voted to stay. So we said, “This is time for another independence referendum.” And then what did they say? “Nope, it’s a once in a generation.”

We’re now at the point where it’s more than 10 years away, so we can say it’s nearly another generation, so we’ve got time for another referendum. But the big difference is Steve, is that we’d win this time. So it’s very unlikely that we will be granted a referendum because we’ll win.

But as a movement in Scotland, we’ve come to this kind of general conclusion I would say, that you can win a referendum with 51%, but you can’t create the state that you want with 49% of people who vote against it.

So we really need to start pushing our movement to get 60, 70% of people who would say they would vote yes in a referendum.

And once that happens, for a period of time, then it really becomes politically extremely challenging for the United Kingdom or for England and Westminster not to grant a referendum.

But at the moment, they can just say, “It’s not the will of the Scottish people. It’s once in a generation, so you’re not going to have another referendum.” But these are huge problems.

And without going into the politics of the history of it, which is incredibly interesting [indeed] I do think it will detract slightly from the core of the paper and the economics of it.

Steve Grumbine:
00:24:20

With that in mind, let’s do this the way you’re saying. Let’s just cosplay that we are jumping from, how does this happen to it’s happened. Voila. We’re now independent. Take us through the paper.

Will Thomson:
00:24:33

Yeah, well, after a considerable period of recovering from a hangover, we would have to start planning our independent economy. And the Scottish government have had a plan since about 2018.

Well, they’ve had a plan before the referendum in 2014, but the plan changed slightly in 2018. And I think this is really interesting because it speaks completely to this idea of monetary independence.

But the referendum in 2014, a lot of academics say that was lost because of the Scottish government’s position on currency. And what Alex Salmond said was that we would continue to use the pound and we would be in an economic union with England.

And I’ve interviewed Alex Salmond. Unfortunately, he passed away last year.

I interviewed him just a couple of years ago and I put this to him and he said, “Looking back, I still think I made the right decision, but if it was now, I would make a different decision.” So there’s a politician speaking for you there, Steve. But what he said was, too many things changing.

So we just thought if we kept the pound, then we wouldn’t be arguing about that. And that’s one of the reasons that we lost the referendum and most people would agree on that.

So in 2018, the Scottish Government said, “Okay, what we’ll do is we’ll have our own currency, but we’ll only have our own currency when these six tests are passed.” And basically it was saying, we’ll have our own currency, but it’ll take us quite a while to get there.

So in effect, we’re still going to be using sterling. And this was the position in 2018, and it’s not changed.

So the economic plan still sits around this idea that we’ll become independent, but not monetary independent. And there’s a group in Scotland called Scottish Currency Group who’ve commissioned a wonderful French academic to look at the impact of this.

And this paper is going to be out next year. So we decided to look at one of these other particularly peculiar decisions that the government was making if it wanted to be independent.

And the one that we focused on was the decision to mirror the fiscal rules in the European Union. And that’s really what our paper focused on.

And the conclusion was that this type of decision made so early, would put Scotland in a position where it was making all of its rules, all of its decisions, because it wants to get back into the European Union. And we just said this puts you on a path that you probably don’t want to be on.

And a really important point to make is in an economic paper that the Scottish Government wrote in 2022, and we quote this in the paper, it says, “The great thing about independence is it allows you to set up the types of institutions that you want.” And then a little bit later in the paper in 2022, it says, “We will copy the European Union’s fiscal rules.”

So the economic plan is just completely inconsistent. And you can see that these decisions are being made from political point and perspective rather than an economic one.

Because when you start looking at detail of what the impacts of things like fiscal rules will have on a new state, it’s just clearly impossible that any new government or new state would come into being wanting to have fiscal rules. It really undermines the whole economic plan.

So to go back to your question, it was trying to say, “Hold on, before we become independent, we need to have a plan that actually supports Scotland’s economic resilience and is likely that independence will be a success, because what you’re planning at the moment won’t do that.”

Steve Grumbine:
00:28:04

It’s funny you say that, because I think to myself, you know, as an MMT-minded individual, going back to the adoption of the euro and the concept of the European Union and so forth. There were several layers of conversation there, okay?

And one of them, probably the most important one, was the euro-adopting countries had given up their monetary sovereignty. They had given up their ability to act in the way that you’re seeking to have Scotland act, in the way that England had chosen to act.

And unfortunately, because of the way it was sold, because of the economic illiteracy of the loudest voices, it was cast off. And there may be some truth to this, by the way.

There I’m sure there are factions, but they just tried to poo poo it as, “Oh, you’re just a bunch of racists that don’t want immigrants in the country. You just don’t want this, that and the other.”

But there was a legitimate economic reasoning, rationale for not adopting euro in general, and that has been lost by almost everyone other than the MMT community.

And those fiscal rules just seem like common sense because of cultural hegemony and the use of the institutions to promote these ideas that everybody just considers, you know, “Yeah, it’s just common sense. It’s just, yeah, of course that’s what we should do. Right? That makes all the sense in the world.”

Because these are the things, in my opinion, that this paper address[es] in different ways.

But people, I think they get lost in the political because no one sits down with their tea or their coffee just for, you know, the sake of listening to an economic conversation other than folks that like economics. They listen to political speech. And so the way that these politicians present things is rarely straightforward, rarely correct even.

Will Thomson:
00:29:55

Yeah.

Steve Grumbine:
00:29:56

And almost entirely propaganda.

How do you help people who have been, maybe I don’t know what the word for it is, but like, their view of anything you have to say has been colored by that fight for independence.

Will Thomson:
00:30:10

Heavily influenced.

Steve Grumbine:
00:30:11

Yes. Yes.

Will Thomson:
00:30:13

I think it’s really important to not pick a fight when you don’t need to.

And when Dirk and I sat down to write the paper, we said, “Look, it’d be really easy to make this a paper that says that the European Union is a horrible institution in Scotland should have nothing to do with it.” But that’s not the argument that we’re making.

We want to say to people, we’re going to look at this and work out what would happen if we followed the European Union’s fiscal rules. And what we said in the paper was we’re just going to make assumptions here. We’re going to make assumptions that we become independent.

We follow these rules when we try and get into the EU and then we try to have the euro. So we’ve just got very basic assumptions.

And we say in the paper, if Scotland became independent this year, we would be applying to join the euro, probably in about 2035 or maybe even closer to 2040. And we’ve just said, you know what? Seen 15 years, Scotland joining the European Union, joining the euro might be the best thing.

Who are we to say that in 15 years’ time, we know what the best decision for a small nation would be considering the speed and the amount of upheaval that we see, and not just economics and culturally and socially at the moment. So we just said, let’s not pick a fight. Let’s just say that might be a decision for us to take further down the line.

But near term, if you’re talking about independence coming in the next few years, what would be the impact of trying to align with the European Union? And let’s focus on this one thing. So not picking fights, I think is really important.

But making it clear to people that Scotland can have the Euro until it has its own currency is also another way of kind of undermining the opposition to what you might be saying, because it’s absolutely true. And again, you can say to someone, it might be the best thing for us to have the euro, but we can’t do that until we have our own currency.

So let’s make sure that we do that in a way that enhances our economic resilience rather than negatively impacts it. So that was how we tried to address it. And as you said at the start, it was in no way to say independence is not a good idea.

It’s to highlight that it is. And it’s the main reason to support independence, because of the ability of Scotland to start with a clean slate.

So why throw that out by copying fiscal rules set by a body that you’re not even a member of?

And this is a really important point because I just want to make sure the audience know, the Scottish government wants to apply the EU’s fiscal rules before– I’ll say that again- before it becomes a member of the European Union.

And we were just kind of saying it’s taken all of the stick without any of the carrot. It’s saying that we will follow these rules without even being a member. That’s how ludicrous the political position is.

And we wanted to get into the economics of that.

Intermission:
00:32:57

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Steve Grumbine:
00:33:18

When I look at the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and you know, a lot of the US’s empire is controlled or leverages the stick of the IMF. Structural adjustments imposed upon typically Global South countries that take on debts.

Suddenly they come into this agreement with the IMF to provide liquidity in a foreign currency or whatever, but they have to sell their soul. They have to do all these things. They have to give up protectionism. They have to open up all the markets. They have to open up everything. It sounds a little bit like that’s what they’re saying to you all. It’s like, “Hey, before you can join us, you’ve got to become an austere nation.

You’ve got to do all these austere things and then maybe we’ll let you in.”

Will Thomson:
00:34:02

Well, no, Steve, because they’re not even asking. It’s the Scottish government just volunteering.

Steve Grumbine:
00:34:08

Oh, boy.

Will Thomson:
00:34:09

This is where the political economy comes into.

The Scottish government wants to portray itself to the markets as being the kid in the class that turns up with the apple and gives it to the teacher. Right? “Because if you want to invest in Scotland, then we’re much safer for your investments if we have some kind of fiscal rule, and to prove to you that we’re going to be such a wonderful independent country, we’ll have the European Union’s fiscal rules before we’re even a member.”

So this points to who they’re trying to persuade and who they’re trying to engage with in terms of what the economics and what the economy of an independent Scotland will be like. And we are just saying this is not your target market.

You need to go out to a society where only 50% of people support independence and say to another 25%, you need to vote independence because we will deliver the type of economy that you want. We will deliver investment, we will deliver a much better healthcare system and educational system.

We will have a place in the world that doesn’t align itself with Israel and with other powerful hegemonic issues around the world. But we will be much more of an independent nation fighting a progressive path. You need to create some kind of narrative that inspires people.

And 3% fiscal rules do not do that. And this helps you understand who they’re trying to persuade.

And we think the only way we can get to that group of people who would vote independence is by explaining to them the potential that’s available when you become independent, when you take a step back and you understand the power of currency, when you understand the power of money. And that’s really what we wanted to hint at with this paper.

Steve Grumbine:
00:35:53

So you addressed the fiscal rules up front. Let’s talk about the sectoral balances of Scotland. Take us through this. I mean, obviously sectoral balances are core to modern monetary theory.

Even if you don’t use the words here, let’s just be crystal clear, sectoral balances are an accounting identity. And that identity, the economics lens can be, you know, foo foo at times based on neoclassical stuff.

But when it comes down to accounting identities, this is science. This is tried and true. This is, “I’m looking at a mirror. Here’s what it says.” Boom. And there is no wiggle room there. So talk to us about Scotland’s sectoral balances.

Will Thomson:
00:36:31

Well, that’s why we wanted to use it, because of its simplicity. And I’ve met some members of the Parliament in Scotland and simplicity helps when you’re talking about economics.

And I’ve also met some of the civil servants and looking at it through this lens helps as well.

So we didn’t want to write an overly technical paper because we wanted to be able to talk to ministers and say, if you do this, then this will happen using this framework of [sectoral] sectorial balances. So I think it’s really important just to highlight, because I don’t think we’ve covered it yet exactly what the fiscal rule is.

And certainly some people will know this, but the fiscal rule that we concentrated on was that the government can’t have more than a 3% deficit every year, so it can’t spend and tax any more than a 3% difference between its spending and its taxation. And that’s the fiscal rule that Scotland wants to adopt. So we just said, “Okay, where are we right now?”

So we looked to find Scotland sectorial balances, and no one had ever done them before. So our six months went to nine months because we had to work what those sectorial balances were. So we designed them. We put everything together.

We had quite a bit of support and advice from within the MMT community for this. And it just showed that normally going back to 1998, when we were able to start the figures, the private sector in Scotland very rarely net saved.

I think it was like seven years out of 25 years when the Scottish private sector was able to net save. And this shows really clearly on the sectorial balances. And the first thing you say is, “This is not good.”

This is what creates a very fragile private sector, you know, and private sector, households, businesses, financial services sector, very rarely with net saving. This is not good. So that came out really clearly from the sectorial balances.

What it also showed was that normally the foreign sector had a surplus of roundabout 8 to 10%. So what it showed was clearly that a lot around about 8% of Scotland’s GDP was leaking out of Scotland every year.

So the financial wealth sectorial balances only looks at the financial wealth, and we could see that every year about 8% of GDP was leaking out of the country. Another serious issue for any nation, even if it’s independent or part of a bigger nation.

And then the third thing that the sectorial balances were able to show was that even though our public sector deficit was round about 10%, it was consistently between 10 and 12% since the financial crisis. Everyone in the UK talks about how big Scotland’s public sector deficit is, and at 12%, it’s large compared to other nations.

But it’s not enough to allow the private sector in Scotland to net save. So we were able to say, “Hold on a minute. The UK is not spending too much on Scotland.

It’s not spending enough on Scotland because of the structure of our economy.”

And when you see this amount of money leaving the country, this speaks to wealth and the ownership of wealth, and that’s really what we wanted to get into.

So our main points to the Scottish government were you need to focus much more about the financial health of the private sector when considering independence. And you need to look at wealth and the ownership of wealth, because we can’t be in a position where we become an independent nation.

But 8% of our wealth still leaves the country every year because that means the ownership of those stocks of wealth is also abroad.

So the sectorial balances, despite being a really simple framework, allow you to have some really deep, powerful and hidden lens on what’s happening in an economy. And that’s really where we’ve had our biggest successes. Now, we might be wrong, but here’s what sectorial balances tell us.

So tell us how we’re wrong and how you’re going to achieve a prosperous society, when we can see the only way of doing that was reducing the wealth of the private sector. So really, really powerful stuff.

Steve Grumbine:
00:40:29

I think this is worth noting.

We talk about, in a fiat system, when you have a fiat currency, that there isn’t really anything like capital flight, because the government has the ability to do all kinds of different things to offset that kind of flight. However, we know political economy will tell us that whether or not that may be true and whether or not we know that the average person doesn’t know that. Where would you consider capital controls in such a thing?

I know that’s not necessarily in the paper, but I’m curious if you consider that as part of a potential bridge or…

Will Thomson:
00:41:08

I don’t think that’s specifically an issue where we would be focusing on, because it’s almost like looking at bolting the door once the horse has left. And we really need to look at the ownership of wealth. If you’ve got ownership within the country, then capital flight is not a problem.

The problem is that the ownership of your resources is based externally. And that’s what we are really trying to address with the sectorial balances.

And we don’t cover this in the paper, but I think it’s an illustrative example, is that 70% of the Scottish whiskey industry is owned abroad. Now, it’s probably one of our biggest industries in the UK.

It’s certainly one of the biggest industries in Scotland, but 70% of the profits go abroad. So we have our First Minister going across to the rest of the world saying, “Buy more Scottish whiskey. This will be great for Scotland.”

That might be true, but it doesn’t improve your sectorial balances because 70% of that money is still flowing outside of the country.

And these are really important points because when we speak to government ministers and they say, “Qell, all we need to do is increase the exports, we’ll increase the exports and then we’ll be able to achieve this 3% public deficit rule.” And we say, “Well, you won’t because of the state of ownership of our exporting industries.

This might reduce it a little bit because you’re exporting more, but if those profits still leave, then your sectorial balances are still in the same position as where we started and that money has to come from somewhere. So that’s not an answer, Minister. How are you going to achieve this 3%?”

So you can really get to the details of this when you look at the financial flows.

I certainly think the currency flight is really important, but it’s another area where we would have to properly address what is the plans if you’ve got that concern.

Steve Grumbine:
00:42:56

Very, very good.

So you talk a little bit about foreign direct investment [FDI] and I see a lot of countries that are maybe not as stable looking into that, and it does come with some serious downfall, some serious problems. Talk to me a little bit about the role of foreign direct investment in Scotland.

Will Thomson:
00:43:17

Well, one of the really interesting things is this is a systems dynamics point.

But every year Ernst and Young come out with a report that talks about the region of the UK which has been the most successful in attracting foreign direct investment. So already you can see some significant assumptions placed under that idea when they’re writing that report.

But for the last three or four years, Scotland has been second only to London, which means our government has been able to stand up and say, “Once again, Scotland is the second most desirable region of the United Kingdom for direct and foreign direct investment.”

And considering all the other things that might be going not terribly well in Scotland’s economy, this is like the one thing where the Scottish government are able to stand up within a neoliberal framework, in front of neoliberal parties like the Labour and Conservative Party in Parliament and say, “Look, we are doing it well because we’re getting loads of this foreign direct investment.”

So to start challenging that and saying to them, “No, the more foreign direct investment you bring in, the worse it is for the medium- and long-term success of our nation,” is hugely challenging. But we didn’t want to walk away from the challenge, so we covered it in the paper and we said, “You know what investment is?

Someone gives you 10 pounds so they can get 15 back. And the only way that they can create that wealth is by transforming natural resources into human made capital.

And those resources are the resources of Scotland. So long term, this is what you’re doing. So it shouldn’t be anything we’re celebrating.”

We should actually be looking at how we pare that down right now, because it’s round about 11 and a half billion pounds each year net flows out of Scotland, with figures going back just until 2021. So we know that’s happening. And we said getting more foreign direct investment isn’t going to allow you to get to this 3% fiscal target.

It’s going to make it worse. So it’s incredibly frustrating that the government think the solution is something that we know is going to make the position worse.

Steve Grumbine:
00:45:18

In the paper, and I want to address this one right on the heels of that, is the supply side changes and removing regulations. This is the neoliberal playbook.

I mean, you address the neoliberal playbook in here quite well. And it’s like all this entrepreneurial culture, the digital economy, artificial intelligence, et cetera, these are all alluring.

And if you look at the stock market, there’s a huge bubble coming anytime now. Scotland would be wise to avoid some of that. But my question to you is, how does that play into your paper.

Will Thomson:
00:45:50

It’s interesting because Dirk’s in his mid-40s, right? So he’s not an old man.

But when we were talking about this, he was saying, “I remember back in the dot com bubble in the late 1990s,” and he said it was exactly the same.

All of the nations of Europe were saying, “brilliant, we can afford these fiscal rules now because our economies are going to become so productive because of the Internet.” And he said, “I’m just looking at now and there’s no conceivable increase in productivity from that point.”

He said, “so we just kind of really need to say, well, what impact would that have?” And what we decided was that these supply side policies do have a big impact on the economy. You can’t deny that.

But what they do is they redistribute wealth, they don’t increase, they don’t speed up growth, they’re not adding to the productivity, they just simply make the wealthy wealthier. And we say that clearly in the paper.

This idea that you could find this missing 5% of GDP by removing some regulations or by increasing innovation or entrepreneurial-ship is just simple madness and there’s absolutely no evidence for it. So we had to tackle that head on because we had to look at the reasons that people would say, “oh no, this is fine, but you’ve misunderstood.

If the economy grows, then all these things won’t be a problem.” So we said, “what will make the economy grow then?”

And we’ve been able to basically undermine all of these kind of central ideas and foreign direct investment, as you highlighted one.

But so many countries have the same issues when they’re just focusing on regulation, innovation, entrepreneurial-ship, as if this will solve all of the problems.

And what we really wanted to highlight was the problem’s not the size of the economy, the problem is the current state of the private sector in Scotland and it cannot in any way face another round of austerity after what’s happened over the last decade, decades and maybe even centuries, if you wanted to go that far back.

Steve Grumbine:
00:47:45

You know, when I think about the world, I mean, I am a little bit an older man. I’m older than Dirk for sure. I’m not sure how old you are.

You don’t need to tell me, but I’m approaching 60, I’m 56 years old and I remember an analog life where we picked up a rotary phone or a push button phone that was hung on the wall with a long spiral cord that you stretched around the corner and it would be staticky and you had call waiting and all these things. And a lot of times when I think about the world, I try to remember where I came from and look at all the changes that have taken place.

But when I think about MMT and I think about the economic conversations that we have, a lot of these conversations feel at times like people that are trying to talk ledgers are talking back to the days of call waiting and are talking back to the days of, you know, really honestly very physical. There’s no Internet, pre-Internet days.

When I see like for example, the Federal Job Guarantee, which I imagine jobs would be a core component of an independent Scotland.

And when I think about what AI and I think about these other things do. You got [Warren] Mosler’s law that says, “Hey, there’s no problem that we can’t have a sufficiently large deficit to fix? You know, we can take care of it.”

But when it comes down to the political economy and watching in the United States right here, right now, major global national corporations like IBM and Amazon and a host of others are using the veil of advances in AI to lay off tens of thousands of people. Workers, okay? Workers that, you know, just having a quick hand. Oh, just give a job guarantee.

Well, no you won’t, because these guys are making a hundred thousand a year, making 150,000 a year. And their families have bills and debts based on that pay.

Whether that seems excessive or not to some folks, this is their material conditions, this is their reality. And when I think about Scotland and I think about things like that, I think a lot of people underestimate the powers that are allied against us.

And I think to myself, how does Scotland avoid that pitfall?

Obviously, using sectoral balances is a way of elucidating the idea that we can have nice things if we understand the role of the currency issuer, et cetera, understanding the relationships between public, private and rest of world kind of balances. But employment, that’s a different story. The business cycle wants to purge people because they see labor as a cost, not a benefit.

This concept feels foreign. I’m in a MMT chat group with people that “No, no, no, Steve, that’s just, you know, we can always do this thing.” And I’m like “but that is completely not considering political economy. And there’s a lot of people that are going to die between when your idea comes true and the idea that these guys are selling is happening.”

Help me understand that from your vantage point, because I know that’s a core part of sectoral balances, understanding real resources and so forth.

Will Thomson:
00:50:52

I think it’s really important that when you talk to people about anything within MMT, you have to say to them, and this talks back to the paper that Randy wrote, you have to say to them, you can’t look at an individual policy and think how does it fit into this neoliberal world that we have? If any country starts implementing policies supported or evidence provided by MMT, it has to do under a completely different policy framework.

It has to understand how the economy works completely differently. So when you’re talking about a job guarantee, it really needs to understand who and where the power is and what the values are of society.

And how do you measure and align your values with the outcomes that you want. It really needs a completely different view of the economy. And I just don’t think as an MMT movement we’re there yet.

You know, there’s no way that, let’s say the British government could just start paying no interest on reserve balances. Of course it could do that if it wanted to. It’s really easy.

But this talks to a value that sits under the neoliberal framework or the neoclassical framework that we need to give money to the wealthy so that they save it because we need their savings for investment.

So we can’t not pay interest on government bonds because less money will go to the wealthy, which will mean we’ll have less investment, which will mean less growth and we’ll have less wellbeing. So these are the fundamental assumptions we have to challenge.

And I would say to anyone, I challenge any MMT person to think that they can answer these challenges with the assumptions underpin MMT. Of course you can.

You’ve got to have a much clearer, wider view of how you want an economy to work if you want any of these MMT policies that you support to come into function, because they just won’t happen without a wider framework that properly understands wealth, properly understands power. And that’s why I think, as I said at the start, Steve, this idea of a political economy and understanding the lens of MMT is really helpful.

So that’s what I would encourage people to do who are very supportive of MMT is just get a wider understanding of the institutions in the country you operate in and really look at how do you point towards changing the values and the assumptions that underpin the economic framework.

Steve Grumbine:
00:53:11

I’m going to throw something at you and this is my own thing, so you can tell me “Steve, that’s just crazy stuff” okay? But one of the things that I have come to believe and I’m looking at your paper as part and parcel of this. Okay?

A lot of people can exactly show you the reserve flows. They can break out those T-graphs and they can show you map the way reserve accounting works. They can do it all, right?

But at the end of the day, until you had an awakening, and I’m not talking about education, we all know these things. We understand these economic truths that MMT has, you know, lit the light for and lit the roadway for, et cetera.

It’s all these baffling and mystifying thoughts that people lack and they haven’t been able to see through it. I think the awakening, which is the pivot point where you take knowledge and it turns to action, is missing. Right?

There’s a lot of folks that want to talk about the balances, the accounting, the this and that, and that’s all very good and very important, but to your point, and really a point that I make frequently, it’s inadequate. And I think to put it into an MMT OG’s world, Bill Mitchell flat out says, “MMT is not the theory of everything.

Stop trying to make it the theory of everything. It is a lens to support other things.” Right? So you apply political economy to this.

And one of the other things that came out of this was the idea that money, it really stops being neutral the minute it’s spent into existence. That’s political economy immediately. All those decisions, anything that’s a decision is political economy.

So unwinding those political decisions is political economy. Is it absent of MMT? It shouldn’t be. MMT should be the lens that informs it. But I think that there’s a delta there.

And I think this is why MMT feels so impossible to people. Because that awakening typically doesn’t come in a coherent political economy/MMT conversation.

It comes in the sanitary MMT ledgers conversation without superimposing the values that would make that person say, “I see it now. Oh, my goodness, yes. Oh, wow!”

Will Thomson:
00:55:25

Absolutely. It’s really peculiar. And trying to be as broad an economist as I can, I read from heterodox schools.

I’m reading a book at the moment about neoliberalism, and it’s called Masters of the Universe. It’s fascinating.

And right from the start, the neoliberal economics was underpinned by a philosophy, and it was that freedom was the most important thing and individuals had to have as much decision over their life as possible. And from that there grew an economic school.

And it’s the same with, you know, you can look at Marxism, you can look at feminism, you can look at ecological economics. It all comes from a position of saying, “Something’s wrong, we need to fix it. How do we see the world so that we can fix it?”

And I don’t know if MMT is unique, but it’s certainly peculiar that it didn’t start from this perspective. Well, actually, do you know, I will take a step back.

I think it did start from that perspective because Warren looked at this from a progressive lens. Bill Mitchell was a Marxist in the ’70s, looked at this from a how do we create a better society?

But somehow over the ’90s and the early 2000s, we seem to have lost this. And I don’t know if it is the people who were attracted to MMT who just said, “This is a great lens. It explains how the mechanics work.”

And as I said, I mentioned it a couple of times now, but Randy Wray’s paper, I think is really important because he’s saying now is the time to use this and think about the society that we want to create.

Steve Grumbine:
00:56:49

Yeah, no, that’s fantastic. Well stated. Well, we’re at time. I would like to give you an opportunity. I’m sure we missed something in this call.

I don’t know what it was, but I’m sure we did. Is there anything, your parting word that you would like to leave the listeners with? By the way, Fantastic. I really appreciated this conversation.

Thank you so much for this.

Will Thomson:
00:57:09

Well, yeah. Okay. Well, a couple of things.

I think the first thing is that, that it’s really important that when we criticize stuff like fiscal rules, we don’t just leave it there and we don’t just say, “Fiscal rules, hopeless. We should do without them.” And what we spent a little bit of time in the paper was saying, and I think this speaks to the political economy.

You know, people do need to feel like there’s some kind of guidelines that the government’s making decisions based on something.

So we said, rather than having this 3% fiscal rule, the government should say, “We’ll make all of the decisions based on sustainability, full employment, price stability and resilience.” And then we broke down what those four things are, and we just said we need to offer people an alternative. And I think we do that in the paper.

And what I’ve been focusing on, and it’s in the title, is this idea of economic resilience.

When I’ve been having conversations with members of the Scottish Parliament and I’ve been talking to them from a degrowth perspective, they’re kind of saying, “You cannot come into this Parliament and talk about degrowth.” Right? “Because it just will not fly.” Right? And I say, “Okay, I get that, but what about if I talk about resilience?”

“Oh, now you’re talking,” so, you know, so you say, “I want an economy that’s more resilient, and I want to support economic resilience.” This is quite a lot of talking points that a lot of people can kind of coalesce around.

And then you say to them, “Well, how do you become more resilient?” And you say, “Well, you have to have more public transport. You have to have less private consumption. You have to get rid of some industries.”

“Oh, so you mean degrowth? “Well, yeah, I suppose I do, in a way” but I think it’s really important that it’s the same with MMT.

You know, I think you can come into people and you can talk about MMT but I think if you take this step back and you say to them, look, let’s use my context. Scotland’s going to become an independent nation, right?

And if we want a progressive society, then we need to look at the lenses that we can use to allow us to do that. And this lens here, this modern monetary theory lens, is fantastic for that because it helps us create a progressive economy.

Now, I think that’s much more appealing to policymakers than someone saying, can I just explain to you how the system actually works? Because most policymakers don’t care how the system works. They want to achieve some form of society. That’s why they’re trying to make policy.

So I think we’ve got to engage in this vision. What is it we’re trying to create, and how does this lens help?

So I think that’s really important, and I hope that when people are having conversations with their family, with their friends, they start to realize the power of this lens. If they can focus on the type of economy that not everyone, but certainly me and you, Steve, want to create.

Steve Grumbine:
00:59:45

You know, I think of that very, very slick acronym WIFM “What’s in it for me?” And we are a very, very atomized, you know, we have been destroyed mentally by this virus called neoliberalism.

The world has been just destroyed, both spiritually, mentally, culturally. And more wars have come from this extreme privatization and all the, “Hey, if you succeed, it’s your fault, and, hey, if you fail, it’s your fault.”

“There is no society.” [said] Margaret Thatcher, all these moments of lies that we have baked into ourselves.

I guess my final question to you is that, you know, based on that, it sounds like one of the key aspects of what you’re putting forward is meeting people where they are on those kinds of subjects because we can’t ledger them into un-atomizing.

This has been a heavily financed project of atomization, of expecting the individual to survive and thrive regardless of whether your neighbor is in the gutter. This kind of, “Hey, you know, let’s just step over the dead and dying.

As long as we’re heading towards financial success and my portfolio says whatever,” would you say that is a core component to how you’re advancing? Because, like, “What’s in it for me with economics of sustainability?” I mean, there’s a lot in it for you, right? There’s a whole lot.

People don’t think about that. I mean, hey, by the way, that’s tsunami you’re avoiding right now. That’s courtesy of, you know, understanding sustainable economics.

But that’s tsunami that is about to sweep you and your family out to sea. That’s the result of not, I don’t know, I’m just, just positing. What are your thoughts on that as we close out here?

Will Thomson:
01:01:31

Yeah, it’s really important to listen to what people’s concerns are. And I think that all too often we can jump in expecting to know what underlines people’s thoughts.

And especially in the UK at the moment, there’s a lot of people who are voting for Reform, which is without doubt a right-wing party, but a lot of people are thinking about voting Reform because they’re offering change. Especially in Scotland. They’re not voting Reform because they’re bigots or they’re racists. They just see a party that’s offering change.

And I think it’s really important to sit down with people and say, “What is it that you want?” Rather than just assuming that they’re going to say less immigration or whatever you’ve come to the table with thinking they’re going to say.

And you’ll often find that people say, “I just want some more security. My kid can’t go out now. I’m really worried about them.” And these are the points that I think that we can talk to from a progressive perspective.

I really think we can say to people, “Hey, you and I, I’m a Green voter or a Scottish National Party voter, and you’re a Conservative or a reform voter. But we’ve actually got so much in common because we see that the society we’ve got right now is broken and we see it’s not working.

And maybe you don’t want to give money to foreigners because you think we should treat people at home first. Well, I’m just saying treat people at home and treat foreigners.

And you can do that when you’ve got a clearer understanding of money and taxes and government expenditure. So we’re on the same page here.”

So that’s how, you know, that underpins the conversations that I have with people is trying to say I’m not going to focus on what separates us, but what do we want?

And I believe, you know, I moved back to Scotland a year ago from living in Catalonia and Spain for 10 years, and I’ve come back to a society which is still, I think, very similar to the one that I grew up in when I was a kid and I was a teenager. I think it’s a deeply progressive, democratic, caring society.

I just think we’ve lost that lens to see it as such because of the influence of the media, which pulls people to the Right when really they’ve got the same views that you and I have Steve.

Steve Grumbine:
01:03:31

That’s fantastic. All right, well, we are at time. I appreciate that so much, obviously, Scotonomics podcast, but tell everybody where they can find your great work.

Will Thomson:
01:03:42

Yeah, well, I’m going to create something a bit different next year, which hopefully I can come on and tell you about next year.

But for the moment, you can find a lot of what I do on scotonomics.org and we’ve just launched the Scotland’s Economics Festival at scoteconfest.org we’ll have three days of amazing heterodox sessions in Scotland. I’ve already got a few people coming across from the States. Your friend John Harvey is coming over to join us.

So we’ll have a wonderful festival in March next year. But on X as @williamgallus and scotonomics.org is where you find a lot of our stuff, a lot of our blogs and even some of our papers as well.

Steve Grumbine:
01:04:21

Fantastic. All right, well, I’m going to go ahead and take us out. Thank you so much for this. I really appreciate it as a great conversation.

I hope you all enjoyed this as well. So with that, my name’s Steve Grumbine. I am the host of this podcast, Macro N Cheese.

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And with that, on behalf of my guest, William Thomson. Great guest. Thank you so much for this. Have to have you back on soon.

Will Thomson:
01:06:01

Thanks so much.

Steve Grumbine:
01:06:02

Yes sir. And myself, Steve Grumbine. The podcast Macro N Cheese, we are out of here.

End Credits:
01:06:16

Production, transcripts, graphics, sound engineering, extras, and show notes for Macro N Cheese are done by our volunteer team at Real Progressives, serving in solidarity with the working class since 2015. To become a donor please go to patreon.com/realprogressives, realprogressives.substack.com, or realprogressives.org.