I was going to ask, Philip… if the local incanters are MMT people, then they should not be running UBI at all! They should be running a Public Service Employment programme, MMT’s flagship policy. Hygge is a fantastic opportunity to try to imagine how that would even work in practice. I find the problem fascinating, because, once you have PSE, it makes sense to use the workforce strategically, to produce public goods. This is acknowledged by Kelton, Wray etc: I wrote about it here:
Emphasis mine. So, if Hygge has a large workforce that the local top incanters can deploy towards “social ills”, they have two problems:
- “Provisioning”, aka making sure they don’t create more purchasing power than purchasable things in the economy, thereby driving inflation, like you say.
- Allocating effort among “social ills”.
That leaves the augurs with two big, nice problem. “Provisioning” is a sort of centralized economic planning – or at least I cannot think on any other way to do it. I imagine some kind of Leontiev’s input-output matrix method, whereby Hygge augurs would declare that, indeed, we have enough consumer goods to sell to the people employed under PSE, no inflation is forecast.
The second problem is to estimate the impact of alternative allocations of that workforce. This cannot be done by measuring GDP-like transactions, because workers are producing public goods, for which no markets exist. You could probably measure physical impacts, but then you have to measure a gain in, say trees planted in terms of foregone art exhibitions. A wicked problem indeed – one can only hope that aethnography has developed ways to make reasonably accountable, participatory decisions. Perhaps these ways are the distant descendants of the methods dear to @amelia and myself.
These two activities would be close to the fully planned economy of lille-Hygge. The (major) difference is that lille Hygge-plans everything this way, whereas stor-Hygge does not plan its market economy (producing private goods), but only its public service economy. Maybe the two Hygges could even share software and methods… this way we get closer to @Joriam’s original vision.
I am pretty inexperienced at macro. @petussing, would you be up for taking a crack at imagining running the central bank in Hygge?