Ep87 [1/2, 6/7]: An Accounting Model of the U.K. Exchequer

Welcome to episode 87 of Activist #MMT. Today I talk with all three co-authors of the 2020 paper, An Accounting Model of the U.K. Exchequer, which is published by The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies, or GIMMS. The three authors are Richard Tye, Andy Berkeley, and Neil Wilson. (Here's a link to part 2. A link to all seven parts can be found here.) Today's episode is part one of a two-part conversation, but it's also part six of a larger seven-part series on the paper and its authors. (A link to all seven parts can be found here.) The first five are personal interviews with each individual author. In part six, today, and seven, next week, I talk with all three together about their paper in depth. (It should also be noted that David Merrill played an important role in the paper, and was the primary influence of this seven-part series.) Today in part one, we talk largely about the meta of the experience writing the paper: their workflow, the software tools they used, their unique experiences with public records requests, and how they took the large amount of work and finally put it all together into a coherent whole. Aside from its length, I found the paper to be quite difficult. Not because of their writing, but simply because what they're writing about is really, really complicated. Before attempting to read the paper, I strongly recommend first listening to their MMT Podcast interview [parts one and two], and also watching co-author Andy Berkeley's forty-minute presentation (as organized by my previous guest, Asker Voldsgaard [parts one and two]). Speaking of difficulty, the paper was deliberately written to be an unabridged and undistilled reference manual. Someone must understand and document everything, and that's the role this paper serves. Now it's time to start translating and distilling these details for the general public. Towards the end of today's episode, I start asking specific questions on the paper. One of the first is a question by an Activist #MMT patron named Advait. If you'd like to ask a question of my future academic guests, please consider becoming a monthly patron. But now, let's get onto my conversation with Richard Tye, Andy Berkeley, and Neil Wilson.