Episode 61 – HBCU’s, Codeswitching and MMT with Matthew Robinson

Macro N Cheese – Episode 61 
HBCUs, Code Switching, and MMT with Matthew Robinson 
March 28, 2020 
 

Matthew Robinson [intro/music] (00:03):  

I think a multiracial, multiethnic, progressive coalition could take things somewhere, but always in the back of our mind, the money on the other side is going to pop up and say, what about those people? They don’t deserve this. They’re the lazy ones.  

Every day, every month, every election cycle, we go without implementing a jobs program, which we can fund because we sure as hell funded those wars. Without universal health care, without a better safety net, we are losing people.  

Geoff Ginter [intro/music] (00:41):  

Now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse all together. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.  

Steve Grumbine (01:34):  

Yeah. And this is Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese. Today, we’re going to take a dive into the collegiate world. A gentleman, named Matthew Robinson is a PhD student out of UMKC, and many of you all who follow this program are aware of the interdisciplinary program at UMKC.  

Folks like Scott Fullwiler, Stephanie Kelton, Randall Wray, Fadhel Kaboub and others have been around there and very interesting programs, especially with the likes of Bill Black and others, but we’ve got the opportunity to speak with a Mr. Matthew Robinson, who is doing some really great work reaching out to HBCU’s and kind of filling them in on the things that many colleges, you know, just miss with the heterodox side of economics. 

And with that, I want to bring my guest on and let him tell us all about it. Matthew, welcome to the show, sir.  

Robinson (02:26):  

Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it. 

Grumbine (02:28): 

 Absolutely. Well, the pleasure’s all mine. So talk to me. You are a student at UMKC. What is that like? I’ve been there one time and that was at the very First Modern Monetary Theory Conference a few years back. And I absolutely loved the campus. It was a lot of fun to be there. Tell me, what’s your experience like?  

Robinson (02:46):  

It’s been great. I’m a California kid, so it can get a little cold at times, but the department’s fantastic. I’ve been at three campuses now, so my undergrad school of Fresno State in Fresno, California; the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado, and here in Kansas City at UMKC.  

And I’ve felt most at home here and all those campuses have been great and those departments are great, but here it’s really time to shine, and the kind of work that I want to be doing is being done here, and I’m around a great team of people. It’s fantastic.  

Grumbine (03:21): 

 Absolutely. And you know, I left off one of the big names, and that’s the one who recommended us to talk to you, and that’s Mat Forstater, who’s been a friend of the program for some time now. Tell me about your relationship with Mat.  

Robinson (03:33):  

Dr. Forstater hooked me a couple of years ago. I was at a paper conference at the New School a few years ago. Another graduate student, Jordan Ayala, who I’d spoken with before introduced me to Dr. Forstater and that was it. I don’t want to say I fell in love, but I was like, where’s that guy at? I need to be in that program.  

Grumbine (03:57):  

I think we all love Mat Forstater. He is a gentlemen and just such, he’s got so many great stories. I just can’t even imagine working with him in that regard.  

Robinson (04:08): 

 Yes. He’s great. Very supportive. He’s great in pointing you in the right direction. So, it’s been a wonderful relationship. I’m glad that I get to take classes with him.  

Those are real treats, and almost everybody who I’ve met, who was a student at UMKC, as an econ undergrad took his 420 class, which I believe is Ecological Economics, and they decide that’s it. I’m going to be a graduate student at UMKC. So he’s hooked half the department. That’s great.  

Grumbine (04:43):  

That’s absolutely amazing. He’s a very, very nice man. He’s been very supportive of our work and bringing you to us, that’s a double plus good, Mr. Forstater, Thank you, sir. So Matt, talk to me about your project.  

I mean, HBCU’s, first of all, we know that there’s so much history there and we’ve had quite a few people through the doors that have talked around this issue. You’ll be the first one that actually directly addresses it. But this subject of heterodox economics is kind of like the key, the linchpin to so many injustices in the world.  

Being able to remedy those through economic means and, you know, having the wherewithal to be able to describe how we get to these great solutions, just understanding the realm of possibilities, it’s gotta be a tremendously empowering thing. And I’m very excited to hear about how you’re delivering this to them. Talk to me about what generated this.  

Robinson (05:39):  

I think it actually started as an undergrad at Fresno State. I was lucky enough to take a class by a heterodox economist who’s trained at Colorado State University who really is a bit critical of the neoclassical understanding of urban economics.  

So I was volunteering a lot and going to classes. And I was saying, Hey, I understand what’s in the textbooks, but I also see what’s happening in the part of town I’m volunteering on. And this was probably 2009, 2010. So one side of Fresno, very segregated at this point, you probably had like a 20% unemployment rate for this part of town.  

And it was like what’s in the textbook isn’t reflecting the reality of my job prospects or the the job prospects of my friends, or those I was working with in this part of town. And so I got pointed towards the heterodox side of things and I was lucky in that. I hadn’t heard of it all the way through my program. I talked to a professor up there who was like you might like this.  

Check out the University of Denver. They’re a heterodox program. They’re a little bit more critical of these assumptions that you have a problem with. And what we’re trying to do is reach out to HBCUs and present that to them now.  

So they don’t have to stumble upon it like I was lucky enough to. We want it to be part and parcel, front and center because the textbook stuff isn’t working for us, it never has worked for us and it’s not working for us.  

And so I think it’s important that folks who go to HBCU’s who tend to be a little bit more critical of this mainstream view see that, “Hey, yes, there are alternative views. Here we are. Join our program or take a look at some other heterodox programs.” And a bit is happening around the issue of race and racism within the larger economic field, right now. 

It was a big topic at the ASSA meeting this last year. Last year was the 50th anniversary of the National Economic Association. We’re very proud that this year’s president is Dr. Linwood Tauheed, who’s a professor at UMKC. So all of this circles around to create, not a perfect storm, but a place where I want to get this message out.  

We have faculty who are supportive of it. We have this great relationship now with the NEA. And so far we’ve visited Morehouse. Unfortunately on account of the virus, we won’t be able to make it to Howard this April, but this next year we’re hitting it hard.  

Grumbine (08:33):  

That’s powerful. I wonder, you know, you look around to see where we can make the most progress. And I remarked to several people, we really need to find a way to diversify this message, to get it out beyond just what is typically the stuffy white tower of econ and get it out of that glass case and get it into the hands of people who are able to make a difference with it.  

I mean, this information is only as good as it’s used, right? And to be able to get into the hands of people that have goals and aspirations of bringing about meaningful change, especially in areas, I mean, you bring up the virus and poor areas in particular, some of the inner cities, some of the more vulnerable communities, we’re talking about, a lack of health care, a lack of access to safe and secure and sanitary services.  

So many things that come to mind as you think about what economics provides for the mobilization of real resources. And you think about groups that have been traditionally left behind and you think, wow, what if we gave them the tools to make things happen? What if we gave them the weapons of warfare, which in this case are economic in nature?  

I think this is tremendous. And to get people who are actively seeking knowledge, to give them these tools and to give them a direction and provide a way into the fold, so to speak, and let them use whatever’s going on in their world, come out through this. It’s just phenomenal. I really commend you for that. What has been the acceptance of how people responded to what you’ve been doing,  

Robinson (10:16):  

They’re into it. So there’s the theory side of things, right? We go out and present these things, stratification economics, which is big with its founder Dr. Sandy Darity who’s been a great friend to the MMT crowd, institutionalists and post-Keynesian stuff. It’s been popular. And then I don’t want to say just the MMT theoretical framework, but what MMT says about what we can do for communities.  

So again, Morehouse, that’s the home of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who talked a bit about a job guarantee and, you know, economic rights. And as far as seeing this one of the first economists to suggest a federal jobs guarantee was Sadie Alexander, the first Black economist in the country, and she got her doctorate back in the, believe it was the twenties, 1920.  

So I can’t imagine what that was like for Black woman back then. But even back then, it was like, the market is not going to provide adequate, certainly adequate employment for Black Americans. We need to do something else. Beyond that, I’m still lucky to work with this team up at UMKC at the Center for Economic Information.  

So we have folks who work on health issues here in Kansas City, and we’re all in the econ department. So Natalie Kane works on childhood asthma. Neil Watson works on lead poisoning. We have Jordan Ayala who works on housing conditions. We work under Dr. Doug Bowles, who’s our director there, Kayla Weru, who’s a fantastic project manager and Professor Tawky. And now my area with that is violent crime.  

And so we use GIS and mapping programs there to see what’s hitting communities the worst. Kansas City is an especially segregated city, but there are segregated cities all over this country. And guess what? Childhood asthma is worst in a segregated part of town — lead poisonings, worse housing conditions are worse.  

I’m right now working with some partners out of a community center. And we, this week, as a matter of fact, are going to put together, basically like a threat index of who’s going to be hurt the most by this virus, if it spreads in Kansas City.  

And it’s going to be, like you said, in the most segregated parts of town, because they’ve suffered for years of inequitable healthcare, poor housing conditions, you’ve got interstates running right through the neighborhood. So it’s great working with those community partners, or we work with something called the KC Health Corps Project and it connects community members with information.  

And so I think it’s a great use of economists’ time to actually reach out to folks who live in the communities that you live in, share the information that you have, provide recommendations, and then get feedback, because if we have information or we’re doing our own thing, we think this is important, but it means nothing to community members, then it doesn’t matter. 

 It says sounding smart because we have our fancy degrees or something, but getting out there, helping people, doing food drives, walking around with them in their neighborhoods, seeing where they’d like neighborhood cleanups, talking with victims and perpetrators of violent crime, about what we can do to advocate for a better community for them.  

Grumbine (14:01):  

I mean, that’s really powerful. I’ve read some stuff. Michelle Alexander and her New Jim Crow Laws book was one of the greatest eye-openers. And even recently we had Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on who talked about red lining and post-red lining and what she called predatory inclusion.  

And it seems like every step along the way, minority communities have been both beaten down and told that they need to do better, while simultaneously being preyed on for wealth creation and capitalist utopia for the wealthy people.  

And it’s just kind of unfathomable to me how brutalized, if you will, these communities really are. It makes sense that they would have a skeptical eye. It makes sense they wouldn’t want to hear about lofty things from lofty people and fancy degrees.  

And they want to see somebody that cares. It’s like that old saying, nobody really wants to know what you know, until they know how much you care. And I think you captured that.  

I mean, the idea of being amongst the people, with the people and listening to what their interests are and finding out where their pressure points are, and then being able to take that knowledge that you have from both the education world and your research, and turn that into something useful for them within their community. I just think that’s really phenomenal.  

So what is it like as a student pursuing this kind of work? You know, you’re both learning the material yourself and you’re also living it in real time. Kind of like this is like really hands on economics, isn’t it? I mean, this is not just theoretical.  

Robinson (15:43):  

Oh yeah. I think it’s great. I really am thankful that I’m not stuck in some bubble where theory rules the day, and all I do is theory, theory, theory. Come home and then put on a different hat, so to speak. So I have an advisor. I call my advisor back home, shout out to big Les. And Les and I talk back and forth about these kind of things.  

So Les grew up in the part of town where it was very segregated, employment prospects were next to nil, especially for Black men. And so when I learned something up here, we start doing these kinds of programs, I call and ask him what he thinks.  

And in a fair world, Les would be an econ professor, but he wasn’t because he grew up in a part of town where he had to keep the lights on by doing whatever he had to. And I’m thankful that he and so many other folks in Fresno and here in Kansas City have been able to give me feedback and excuse my language, tell me why I’m full of bullshit. 

And that’s important to me because it’s not just satisfying whatever we have going on in this ivory tower here. But to me, it’s important that what we do connects with folks who are out in the economy. And I had a fantastic professor back at Fresno State, Dr. Donald Cheek, he said: “It’s your job as a brother to figure out what this means on the corner.”  

So what it means is out in the segregated East side of Kansas City, or the West side of Fresno, or the South side of Chicago, what’s all this theory mean out there. And to advocate for those people. Cause like you said, econ isn’t well known for advocating for those who aren’t super-privileged. We’re theorized about a lot, but nobody comes to talk to us.  

Nobody’s going to go those sides of town. And so as much as we can, we try to inject that into the larger conversation and be supportive. That’s a big thing with us is that we are serving a support role to people on the front lines who are running gun violence reduction programs, who are advocating at city hall or town halls.  

We’re numbers people, and some of us can go home, and we’re privileged with that. We can buy big fancy houses because we’re well-paid economists. I’m not, at the moment. I’m a grad student; but there’s a certain distance there, and if we can make life better for people, knowing what we know with the tools that we’ve learned, that’s it.  

I’m fine with that. And if mainstream economists want to do something else, that’s fine, but my people can’t eat theory. And that’s very important to us, that gets us up every day. I’ll put it that way.  

Grumbine (18:56): 

 I’m a father, and I think about my kids all the time and the society we live in today is cruel all around. It’s affecting every community, but obviously it’s affecting communities that have been traditionally left behind even harder. Generational wealth isn’t there, access to opportunity isn’t there, a lot of societal norms in terms of the way people are treated and viewed, still rule the day.  

Things may change in some ways, but stay the same in many others. I’m interested in hearing, given some of the issues that I feel are often neglected in the public space, especially during the presidential election and you see a movement going on and you look at the numbers and you see, goodness gracious, we’ve got nearly 90% African American vote going to what would be considered to be the corporate candidate.  

And you look at a movement where we’re trying to advocate for these policies, and there seems to be a gap there, there seems to be a tough ride to closing that gap. And I know that a lot of it’s generational, it’s not all just within the African American community, but I’m curious on your take on what stunts that, or keeps that gap so wide.  

What do you think? To me watching this I see an economic story unfolding before our eyes that says we can do wonderful things for people. We really can. The opportunity is there. Won’t you believe? And then you see the other side saying we can’t possibly do that. That’s just pie in the sky. There’s no way we can do that, and people flock to the pessimism. I don’t understand it, but I’m curious, what is your take on that?  

Robinson (20:49):  

There’s a healthy sense of skepticism that’s built up in the African American community about this. We know what a federal jobs guarantee can do. I can go out on any corner over here in the East side of Kansas City and talk to folks and say, Hey, how would you react to $15 an hour today? Today we can get that for it.  

They know the benefits of universal health care. What our calculus looks like is yes, we want those things. Yes, we understand that Bernie Sanders is presenting those things, but what does history tell us about A, getting our hopes up and B, going that progressive. Our calculus involves, well, what are white folks going to do?  

We can vote for it all we want, but unless there’s an equal amount of buy-in from white communities and other communities, we see that as a failing venture. And I agree with you. I think that’s incredibly unfortunate, but the history of this country tells us that yes, we see the benefits in these things on paper. 

But I think the election of Donald Trump and 40 years of this turn-away from the public good, and then his most recent turn towards, almost fascism, highlights that our hopes and our reality are not as closely aligned as we would like them to be.  

Things can change quickly, and I hope those things change quickly to a more progressive set of ideals and set of policies, but there’s a backlash to those kinds of things. We will see. We always see this, the idea of the deserving poor and the undeserving poor.  

You’ve got these depths of despair going on, right? So Angus Deaton and (Anne) Case won the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago when they found out that communities with economic stagnation were experiencing higher rates of opioid deaths, alcoholism, and suicide.  

That’s terrible. That’s a terrible story. And it was happening in a fairly specific cohort. I think it was white folks who were 45 to 54 who saw their economic prospects dry up. And so they were suffering from these ill effects. Well, those things have been happening in the Black community for 40 years. So I’m glad that that story is getting out there.  

But hey, this has been happening with us for a long time. And very few, especially mainstream economists, weren’t paying attention to it. Now we’re at a point where we’re talking about those deaths of despair and this is happening all over the country, your rust belt through the Midwest here.  

And I’m happy that we’re talking about those things, like kind of the social aspects and health aspects that are associated with unemployment or poor employment prospects or low mobility prospects. But those folks don’t show up to a federal job guarantee. They’re going to screw with the interest rate or something like that and expect the market to fix itself. So again, this is theory side of things.  

If we come back to politics, it’s unfortunate. I think a multiracial, multiethnic, progressive coalition could take things somewhere, but always in the back of our mind, someone on the other side is going to pop up and say, “What about those people? They don’t deserve this. They’re the lazy ones. We’re taxpayers.”  

Again, I think you’ve talked about this idea of racial taxation is a great book. “We’re taxpayers. They are not. They’ve never been worthy of anything.” We see this, you know, with the ACA. It was reparations. It was a handout to the undeserving. Our calculus has to include that because we know if things go south, who’s it going to be worse off for? Racial and ethnic minorities, Black folks in particular, Jews in particular, all these immigrants now, especially Latinx folks.  

Things are getting a little dicey and I can tell you this isn’t for everybody, but we all have our own story. The night of the election in 2016, I was with my partner, soon to be Dr. Brianne Sleigh and Aretha, who’s a good friend of hers from Detroit, who’s now graduating as a lawyer in a couple of weeks. It was a rough night because I’m sitting with two Black women who understand that what this means for them.  

I had my own reaction to it in private, but things can go great very quickly and things can go very poorly, very quickly, and we all will make it through. But sometimes those things don’t go well for us. And unfortunately that provides a pickup for a full-on, we’re going for it, coalition. That’s going to get Progressive policy implemented.  

Intermission (26:38):  

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you 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 Periscope, Twitter and Instagram.  

Grumbine (27:28):  

That’s tragic. I wish that there was a way that this could be brought to the forefront and really talked about at an honest level on the national scene. It seems like these things are often, you know, you only have them in these private conversations and thank goodness, we’re having this on a podcast where maybe others can listen and understand better, you know, about the why because you look on paper, and I don’t want to say theorizing, cause I think this is a little bit more than theoretical.  

It’s got some street cred to it and you look at what the movement, if you will, is fighting for, and it is a multiracial, multi-gender, non age-specific movement. And it is filled with young people, for sure. But there are people that are of all age groups in this coalition. And so you have to say that the fear of the other shoe dropping is greater because there is no protection.  

There is no buffer. And years and years and years of being tormented and tortured and left behind, you know, leaves you hedging your bets quite frequently, if I’m hearing you correctly. How do we get past that? This is what I’m looking at within your work. I mean, your work has got to provide tremendous hope. I’ve often said MMT is hope, period. Pure hope, there’s nothing but hope in MMT.  

It provides a clear path to seeing the realm of possibilities. What you’re telling me though, is the next layer of that is the challenge of taking this message of hope, this practice of hope. There’s real meat there. The hope isn’t based on vapor, but yet there is real stuff that isn’t based on vapor either. Many, many years and years and years of being left high and dry at the altar.  

And MLK said straight up, the centrist, that milquetoast, white moderate is the greatest danger of them all. Basically, it’s never the time to stand up for the poor. It’s never the time to stand up for the minorities. It’s never the time to stand up for injustice because it’s always some other time in the future.  

And yet here we are terrified of moving forward because of being left high and dry that prevents us from embracing the realm of what could be. Do you feel that your work will in any way, shape or form make a dent in this? Is this the type of stuff that you feel you have a chance of impacting?  

Robinson (30:03):  

I would certainly love to think so. I’ll say I am piggybacking off the work of fantastic scholars and fantastic community activists, folks who were out doing great work all the time. And again, all I feel like I can really say at this point is that I’m doing my best to supplement their efforts.  

I think you’ve spoken with Dr. Delman Coates before. He’s done a great job of getting out to Black churches, which are major hubs of the Black community and presenting this message. Hopefully we’ll have him up here at UMKC sometime soon.  

But he’s going around to Black churches and presenting this alternative view of money and finance and introducing MMT to folks who aren’t going to pick up an economics textbook. I’m barely going to pick up economics textbooks. So he’s done a great job of translating our message to folks who we aren’t reaching yet.  

I hope that some of my work reaches other young, aspiring Black economists, and then the work I do with CEI and GISP, the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. We like to get out. And we like to talk to folks and explain our view of things. I’ve shared Dr. Stephanie Kelton’s video entitled the Angry Birds Guide to Public Finances, something along those lines, and folks get it.  

People who want nothing to do with economics, never want to pick up a textbook, couldn’t care less about the Phillips Curve or anything like that. That makes sense. It’s accounting, it’s easy, it’s accessible. And I think that’s part of it is the MMT approach is accessible. We aren’t in some ivory tower, you know, with 80 equations that you’ll never be able to understand. It’s simple.  

You use a checkbook. Everybody knows how to balance their . . . Everybody knows what a savings account is. We understand accounting. Everybody understands accounting at some kind of base level and showing people how our view of things is A, a better story than theirs. B, true and C, how it can actually impact their lives, I think is a powerful thing.  

And so we’re all, you know, in our little way of trying to connect those things. You have a fantastic podcast here. I have my work out in the community and with HBCU’s and like Dr. Delman Coates, he gets out to churches and spreads this message. It’s going to take awhile. Again, years of cynicism, and not just with economists, but I think average folks, there’s a resistance in some sense to government spending.  

You know, 40 or 50 years of this fiscal responsibility thing really drives the point home to folks. And so getting over that hurdle I think is difficult, but we’re doing what we can, spreading the message and making sure that we listen to folks, meet them where they are, which the mainstream folks never do. And then explain how this is different from that. And that it can actually happen. There’s a lot in that. In fact, that’s a heavy burden for us, a high bar for us to meet, but we’re doing the best we can with that.  

Grumbine (33:40):  

I think probably the most difficult thing I found in terms of understanding implications of MMT. Stephanie Kelton had this great meme she put out there a while back, on one side was a squiggly line all over the place, looked like a Gordian Knot. And on the other side was a straight line with an A and a B. And on the left she said “their way.”  

The MMT was a straight line. And the unfortunate truth of that simplicity is that you don’t get bogged down in a bunch of nonsense. And you see the impacts of not doing these things. The burden of knowing is sometimes greater than maybe any other responsibility I’ve ever felt in my life.  

Knowing the impacts, not just to my own family, I’ve got a responsibility to take care of, but those that I’ll never meet. And in particular, I know immediately that this weird heterodox thinking that most are unable to grab hold of because of the household analogy, they’re suffering in many ways by their own hand because of their own limitations, based on years and years of brainwashing, as you said, the neoliberal era has been particularly cruel to us.  

How do you, as someone who is deeply involved in this, knowing what the impacts of not being able to leverage this knowledge, how do you quell that fire inside? I mean, cause you can’t unsee this as they say. Once you know, you know. How do you maintain that equilibrium knowing there are people dying because of the lack of this knowledge?  

Robinson (35:34):  

Yeah. I have to exercise a lot. Yoga. Yoga has been fantastic for me and sometimes screaming into the pillow because it’s frustrating. It really is. When we go to speak with other economists who might think that our policy goals are great things in theory, but don’t subscribe to our way of thinking, which is fine.  

The MMT framework, it’s frustrating, and as you spoke to the MLK quote about the moderate, white moderates and I’ve, I haven’t called people chumps, but I basically said, I know what you’re saying, but, it’s cute. It’s cute that you do little papers about our neighborhoods and Oh, this thing’s bad, but there’s never like, Hey, what about policy interventions?  

How do we pay for this? Why don’t we cite some MMT papers and some MMT scholars? Like I said before, they get to go home. I don’t.  

Grumbine (36:42):  

The empirical nature though. Forget any of the theories. There’s two sides or three sides or 20 sides, but there’s in particular, there’s the operational reality that has nothing to do with theory at all. And zero to do a theory, it’s like you can follow the inputs, outputs tools, techniques straight through the process flow. And it does exactly what it does, period.  

And then at the theory of what different levers on the equalizer do when you do this, it does that and so forth. That’s where theory comes in and you can have some conversations there, but when it comes down to the way that the actual system works itself, kind of indisputable.  

I mean, this is a fiat currency we’re talking about and we’re not digging gold out of some mountain. Some of the stuff should be empirically true, not debatable even. And I’m fascinated that people that have spent so much energy and time researching a subject can’t at least agree on the foundational rudiments of how the system works.  

I hear people talking about financing deficits, like that’s a thing. And I don’t understand. I get the theoretical side of this. I certainly can understand the tain of the Milton Friedman world with the quantity theory of money still pervasive.  

But I don’t understand how people can’t quite understand money creation and basics of how Congress authorizes it, and it comes to be kind of thing. It just seems to me, there are just some things that should be empirical. We should be able to get past. And we’re just not. Can you talk to me about that?  

Robinson (38:20):  

I think we all have our limits as to how much we engage with that side. For me, it’s incredibly frustrating because again, I’m of the age to where the Iraq War was a big thing. I remember coming home and my parents talking to me like this is probably happening.  

Father is a Vietnam War vet, and so remembering that this is going to happen. We’re going over here. People are going to die. Never a peep about finance gonna have to do, you know, raise taxes. Never had to talk about how we’re going to spend this or the undeserving, or who’s going to end up with this money or if there’s going to be waste involved.  

And then I go to volunteer, I go talk to my friends and we all understand that that side of thing is never questioned. So Tupac is aligned something along the lines of, we always have money for war, but never to feed the poor. I’m from California so I’m going to quote Tupac at least once during this interview. We understand the hypocrisy of it, and it’s unfortunate.  

And even over this last year, I’ve only been in Kansas City for a year and a half now and only been involved with this gun violence reduction stuff for about a year. I’ve met two people. One of them was shot nine times. The other is now locked up on manslaughter charges. I met both of those guys at a community event, which wasn’t funded by anybody.  

This is a perfect thing that MMT and kind of our skill set is built for is what can we do in communities to help people where they live and where they are. Met both of these guys at an event, had no funding at all; and they said they would put down their guns, leave the drug game behind if they could find another way to feed their family. But McDonald’s ain’t hiring.  

I know we have a super low unemployment rate, but they weren’t the ones getting hired. If you don’t catch things when they’re happening, right then, people lose their lives. I’ve had friends back in Fresno, friends and colleagues who’ve passed because this is the environment you grew up in. Unemployment is very high. You need to feed your family.  

And unfortunately with that comes something else. I know exactly who’s going to sign up for a job guarantee, because I’ve talked to them. And for every day, every election cycle that this country goes through by ignoring those people, because we don’t want to talk about those people. They’re on that side of town. In Kansas City there’s a saying in the paper “it’s on the East side of Kansas City from the East side of truth.”  

Well, we all know what that means. That means it’s those people, you know, and it’s sad, but Oh, well they deserved it, those people. They don‘t want to work for a living. In Fresno, the West side of Fresno, “Well, that’s sad, but you know those people over there.”  

Again, every day, every month, every election cycle, we go without implementing a jobs program, which we can fund because we sure as hell funded those wars. Without universal health care, without a better safety net, we are losing people.  

And unfortunately the conditions that occur in communities with high rates, massive rates of unemployment and underemployment, you get some bad externalities. And we can put these on with bandages.  

We can fix those with bandages or you can get to these root causes. It’s not going to fix everything, but everybody who I talked to who’s out on the corner who suffered through these kinds of things, they would love to work. They would love to work in their community, making their community a better place. That sounds like a Green New Deal to me.  

Grumbine (42:39):  

Yes. I don’t know if you ever watched the HBO series “The Wire” is about Baltimore. And I actually lived there for some time. I was out there on Security Boulevard, out there in Mondawmin Mall. A lot of the scenes that you see inside of that show were places that I was, and it was scary in so many ways.  

But you watch that show and you think about how many people were doing things that they absolutely did not want to do, but had no other way out. And before they had a chance they were dead. And I know that that is not everybody’s reality, but it’s enough peoples’ reality that we should never not be talking about this stuff.  

We should never not be talking about it. It should always be front and center. It should never take a back seat. And I think to myself, I can only be an observer, even when I’m in it, I’m not in it. And so I can only be an ally trying to scream out, but as someone that has experienced seeing friends and being able to be that role, I mean, people assume, make assumptions.  

Tell me, what does it feel like to be an African American in this society with this much oppression and all the externalities, as it were, that are bearing down on people. Can you give me a snapshot of what that is? What that feels like, what it looks like? I don’t think people really fully know.  

Robinson (44:12): 

There’s a skepticism built and a sense of humor has to be developed around it, unfortunately. Well, you know, fortunately that’s part of our outlet is making fun of the whole thing. It sucks. We see how far things have come. You know what, I feel like I have a certainly unique perspective on this. Not the only perspective on this.  

I was adopted and raised in a white household. We were the definition of middle-class — father’s a teacher, mother’s a nurse. And I went to school the same as my friends and did a little bit better than some of my other friends, but was lucky enough to have some backing of a middle class lifestyle that they unfortunately didn’t have themselves.  

But when you hit high school and certainly when you hit college, a bit that fades away and then it’s you and like, Oh, the cops didn’t talk to me the way they talked to my parents. Isn’t that funny? The principal isn’t disciplining this friend who grew up on this part of town, the way that they disciplined me, who grew up in this other part of town.  

And I’m thankful for my upbringing and the viewpoints which it gives me. I have a foot in just average everyday, you know, white middle class household. And then when I left the house, well you’re a Black teenager and that means something else. So seeing both of these, what can be, and what is, is part of the driving thing of my whole project here. It’s immensely frustrating when, and I joke about this with my friends back home, especially the Big Les.  

I feel like all of the papers are right; and plenty of the papers I see in both mainstream journals and popular media. Well, we’ve been saying that for a long time, me hanging out on the West side of Fresno, we talked about that 10 years ago. I don’t understand, Wiseman’s got a peer reviewed article and it’s such an, this fancy econ journal saying the same thing. 

I know that. We knew that. And that’s frustrating that again, we’re studied, rarely listened to, and then when we get to the policy side of things, we’re just not included at all. There were Black policy makers, certainly, but a lot of it ends up getting watered down, which is again also frustrating.  

So we laugh about it and I wish that those things would get fixed. But in the meantime, a bit of humor is how we tend to deal with those kinds of things.  

Grumbine (47:04):  

You know, that makes sense all the way around. I mean, you’ve got to have humor or you go crazy. And you brought up something though that just sent shivers down my spine. You come home at night, you’ve got the white middle class upbringing and you have dinner and everybody’s smiling and doing whatever.  

And then you step foot out the door and there’s a police officer looking at you differently. And wait a minute, hold on, you did get to see both sides of this. That’s tremendously, I don’t even know how to say it.  

I mean, it’s deeply depressing that this guy, such a nice guy, you know, not trying to hurt anybody, not doing anything, able to enjoy a meal with mom and dad one minute and the next minute be the bad guy. I don’t even know how to process that. I’m really tripping over myself in my head thinking about how horrible that is. I don’t know how to quite deal with that. Tell me, how did you deal with it?  

Robinson (48:04):  

Again I want to put this out there. I certainly don’t want to make it seem like I’m the only person who’s experienced this. All my friends are typical kids who we did some dumb things and some got in more serious trouble. And then some of us just made little mistakes. And when you’re in that age range, late teens, early twenties, you make mistakes.  

Oh no, for me it was segregating information from my parents and my friends. I didn’t want to tell them about, you know, the time that so and so called me such and such out here, just because I thought that would saddle them with something. That was a conversation with me and my friends. We learned to, and I think that this doesn’t get talked about enough, learned very well, how to code switch.  

You speak one way to your parents and enunciate a little better, and then when I’m out with my friends, the language was just a little bit different. And it’s unfortunate that my friends who didn’t grow up with that same level of privilege, didn’t have the backing that I was provided with. They deserved the same opportunities I was given, and that didn’t happen for them.  

And it’s unfortunate. I think I’m a very average person. And again, I know folks who did not graduate college, but in a fair world, they’d be called professors, but they didn’t have that backing with them. And that’s from decades and hundreds of years of state sanctioned theft, frankly from these communities. Not just theft, but a transfer of money from one community to another.  

So when you can cross that line, you are still paying for public services on the other side of that line. And I think that’s a different story than we have right now. Like those people over there didn’t invest in themselves, don’t value education.  

You know, these kinds of stories. Very briefly, my friend, Natalie Kane, who works in CEI with me, reads a lot of health economics literature and the health economics. And so the story is under this framework, people who live in areas or in housing conditions or areas where their children have high rates of childhood asthma, just as a preference, value their kids’ health less, than people across town with better health outcomes, right? 

So this is a story. And unfortunately, you know, it’s all over the place — those people over there don’t value these things like us, cause we’re well educated, our children are healthier. If they wanted it, they’d just pay for it.  

So that, the upbringing, the initial trainings and neoclassical economics, and in this kind of my world opens up as I get into this heterodox MMT perspective here, that’s incredibly frustrating. It’s so frustrating because again, those folks who write that kind of material never go to other communities and it’s a historical, they don’t care to know.  

And I think there’s a point, that might be on purpose. They don’t want to know about that other side of town, because then that means their framework is wrong and you can’t sell textbooks with the wrong framework. So what was it? I think it’s a Bruce Lee quote.  

There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. And I don’t mean to get too philosophical, but I feel like for a long time I was going through those very frustrating things, walking the path. And I ended up here and it’s like, Oh, this is why I was doing all that stuff.  

This is why I was, I don’t want to upset my relatives who might be listening, so I won’t go into the stories too much, but this is why I was in those spots where trouble popped up. This is what I was going through, those frustrating experiences.  

And now I’m involved, you know, getting involved with policy work. We can do this kind of stuff. And I just wish that we’d listen to people a little bit more, even if they didn’t have a PhD in economics.  

Grumbine (52:31):  

Great insight. I guess I have one final question for you. With the work that you’re doing at the HBCU’s and the current environment that we’re in. What do you think the big message would be through all of this? What is the final exclamation point, if you will, how would you like to take us out?  

Robinson (52:56):  

I think as a practical matter, be involved with your community however you can. And that means coming however you are. I was very thankful that he offered this to me. I had a professor, Dr. Marcus Snyder, back at the University of Denver. I presented this work we were trying to do around gun violence prevention programs and stuff, he’s like, let me know how I can help.  

And I think that’s a great way for us to proceed. I don’t need my econ professors. I don’t need them out in certain parts of the community with me, that’s fine. You know, not everybody needs to go and do everything, but where you are, there’s some way that you can help.  

And I think that starts by listening to communities that you haven’t listened to before, read articles and books by authors and perspectives that you haven’t explored before, push yourself. A lot of this is going to be uncomfortable for all of us. It’s going to be uncomfortable.  

And I’ve read myself into certain positions and out of certain positions, but always working the muscle there, flexing, extending, and wherever you are, there’s something that you can do. But approach things with grace and respect. None of us have all the answers certainly.  

And listen. So when I go out to HBCUs or community events and things like that, and I talk about our perspective, I offer with a brief introduction, and a lot of times I do two hours of listening. Two weeks ago, I told a gentlemen what we were doing designing a gun violence reduction program, and he talked to me for two hours straight. 

And I couldn’t get a word in edgewise, which is fine, but we have a relationship now. And he knew tons of stuff that I didn’t know, and I can work with that. That’s information that I didn’t have before. And whether you’re a community activist, or a politician, an economist however you’re involved with this project, be proud of your work, but there are things each of us don’t know.  

I think when we get into progressive politics, it’s gotta be a partnership and these partnerships can be fantastic things and we can build upon those. And I’m hopeful, maybe I shouldn’t be, but I’m hopeful that we can do those kinds of things. I’ve seen small glimmers of hope here in just the small underfunded department in Kansas City.  

We’ve done great things here. Now, wherever your listeners happen to be, they can do great things there, partner with church partner with the local university. So you’d have the Sunrise movement’s doing in your city or other burgeoning grassroots movements. Get involved, know your place within those things, but get involved and do what you can do.  

Grumbine (56:14):  

I love it. That’s powerful stuff, man. I really appreciate it. And on that note, I’m going to thank you, sir. Thank you so much, Matthew Robinson. And we’ll talk to you real soon. Thank you very much, everybody. Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese. Hope you enjoyed this, we’re outta here.  

Ending Credits (56:35): 

Macro N  Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy.  Descriptive writing by Virginia  Cotts  and promotional artwork by  Mindy Donham.  Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our  Real  Progressive  Patreon account. If you would like to donate to  Macro N Cheese,  please  visit https://www.patreon.com/realprogressives