Hexmarks retweeted
🚨🛑
A little background for my post-Keynesian and MMT friends, and an explanation of what the fuck I've been doing on this account for the last six weeks.
Back in 2022, I met Steve Keen on a random livestream and ended up showing him a rather sophisticated pandemic model for Covid-19 I had developed for British Columbia, Canada, using his system dynamics software, Ravel. I had actually started using his software back in 2017, when I was working at a box factory and experimenting with ways to optimize productivity through system dynamics modeling.
Around the same time I first met Steve on that stream in 2022, I opened this Twitter account. I also started a YouTube channel producing system dynamics modeling tutorials, primarily focused on macroeconomics. Before that, I had deleted Facebook, Instagram, and pretty much every other social media account I had back in 2017 because I couldn't stand that shit anymore. "Just when I thought I got out, they pulled me right back in!"
In 2023, I began developing a large national economic model that led to a lot of unique opportunities and rebranded myself as Relearning Economics. I started posting historical economic quotes, which eventually became a regular feature of the account. Interestingly, quite a few accounts doing the same thing today appeared after I started doing it. Unfortunately, most of them turned out to be libertarian accounts.
Along the way, I met a tremendous number of economists, researchers, and systems thinkers. Those connections eventually turned into a steady side income from economic modeling contracts. Over time, I accumulated a substantial collection of unpublished models, experiments, and research that I wanted to make publicly available.
That eventually led to GDP Dynamics.
I launched @GDPDynamics and its corresponding website this past summer as a home for my economic models, forecasts, and research. Much of the forecasting and modeling work is available to the public for free, while a premium membership provides more detailed analysis and additional research. It has already developed into another source of income, allowing me to spend more time doing what I actually enjoy: building economic models.
Around the same time, I decided to retire the Relearning Economics identity, return to using my legal name on Twitter, and establish GDP Dynamics as a separate brand. Besides when you have the last name Keynes and you work in the field of economics, I could I have not returned to it. Another factor was the release of my book, Beyond Equilibrium: A dynamic Keynesian Approach to Macroeconomics.
After two and a half years, posting historical economic quotes had become rather dated and redundant relative to what I was trying to accomplish. It certainly helped build an audience, but it also came with an enormous amount of bullshit.
For nearly two years, I dealt with a constant stream of Austrian economists and libertarians attacking practically anything I posted. Share a John Maynard Keynes quote and suddenly you're accused of supporting pedophilia. Discuss fiscal policy and you're a communist. Apparently, I'm a communist despite spending a considerable amount of my spare time developing software, negotiating contracts, selling economic modeling services, and running a business. Some days I feel like the most oppressed entrepreneur in economics.
The personal attacks were relentless. I received countless threats of violence from anonymous keyboard warriors, none of whom I took particularly seriously. Nevertheless, dealing with that shit almost every day for a couple of years becomes exhausting.
And this brings me to my Post-Keynesian and MMT followers.
I've watched how our side of the economics community has been treated, particularly by the Austrian and libertarian crowd. The constant insults, accusations, and personal attacks. Being called retards, faggots, woke libtards, communists, and just about every other insult these people can manage to string together. I've seen perfectly reasonable economic discussions turn into absolute cesspools because somebody dared to question the intellectual foundations of Austrian economics.
When I returned to using my legal name and separated the GDP Dynamics brand from my personal account, I had a little social experiment in mind.
Social media has become a clickbait shithole, populated by countless little ideological echo chambers. People spend more time defending their intellectual tribes than actually learning anything. In my case I find it particularly frustrating because I'm in the business of economic forecasting, not abstract fuckery.
So, beginning September 15th, I started a calculated campaign of what I would describe as chud-style economic ragebait, primarily directed at Austrian economists and libertarians, with the occasional shot at New Keynesians and neoclassical economists.
Over the following six weeks, those posts generated millions of impressions.
There were three reasons for doing this.
First, I'm fascinated by how systems behave. That's probably obvious considering I spend a substantial amount of my life building nonlinear dynamic models. Social media is itself a complex system of feedback loops, reinforcement mechanisms, incentives, and emergent behavior. I wanted to see what would happen if I deliberately changed the nature of the content being introduced into that system.
Second, I wanted to change the composition of my audience. My historical quote posting had attracted what I estimated to be somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 Austrian and libertarian followers who had very little interest in my actual economic modeling work. I wanted to shed much of that audience and develop a healthier balance of people genuinely interested in macroeconomics, system dynamics, and the research I publish.
Based on the substantial follower turnover I've observed in my X Premium analytics over the past six weeks, that objective appears to have been achieved.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, I wanted to return some of the bullshit that I and many others in the post-Keynesian and MMT communities have endured on this platform which specifically accelerated after Musk took over.
After two years of watching these people casually throw around personal insults, threats, and accusations, I figured it might be entertaining to give them a taste of their own medicine.
Judging by the extraordinary amount of crybaby fuckery coming from libertarians over the past six weeks, I can say that particular objective has been rather satisfying. Those folk might be more woke than the woke woke(s)...
But there is also a more serious observation here.
What this experience has reinforced for me is just how ineffective social media can be as a platform for distributing substantive intellectual work. You can spend months developing an economic model, testing its behavior, validating its results, and writing a detailed explanation, only to reach a fraction of the audience that a deliberately provocative two-sentence post can attract in a few hours. Sadly this post that I have put effort into will mean little to nothing in a few hours and will probably get very low engagement because it's to long and complex for the TikTok generation.
The incentives overwhelmingly favor emotional reactions, ideological conflict, and instant gratification over research and meaningful discussion. Millions of impressions do not necessarily translate into people reading your work, understanding your models, or engaging with the underlying economics.
This is one of the reasons I established GDP Dynamics as an independent platform. I would rather have a smaller audience genuinely interested in my research than millions of impressions from people arguing about something they haven't bothered to understand.
And for anyone wondering whether I've become permanently consumed by Twitter/X ragebait, I can assure you I haven't. Will I stop, I don't know, If George Selgin gets any more emotionally damaged by my posts about David Graeber, he might end up on Prozac or some other antidepressant and if that's the case I will never stop.
In real life, I ride downhill mountain bikes for excitement, work on economic models, consulting work and run the GDP Dynamics site. As a Canadian I go to a lot of hockey games, say "eh" a lot and cut down trees with and axe. I'm probably more libertarian than a libertarian
Most of the stupid shit I post on this account is written while I'm sitting on the toilet. Not this one, I put some time into this some it can be forgotten about tomorrow.
Hexmarks retweeted
Nearly a century since the end of the gold standard, the household analogy - Thatcher’s “taxpayers money”, Reagan’s “trickle down money“ still fool so many people.
The definition of insanity is voting for the same failed policies over and over and expecting a different outcome.
Hexmarks retweeted
I just finished Hudson's Killing the Host, after reading Mises' Human Action, Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, and Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State last year.
Hudson's book is better than all three combined. Austrian economics is a thousand-page handjob for landlords.
Hexmarks retweeted
MMT isn't saying governments should print money. It's saying they ALREADY do. That's just a fact.
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David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a better contribution to our understanding of money, and debt than anything Carl Menger wrote.
I understand this is deeply upsetting to Austrian Economists, but anthropology doesn't give a fuck about your origin myths.
Hexmarks retweeted
It blows my mind how economists keep coming up with the same stupid solutions: cut government spending, slash taxes for the rich, raise taxes on the poor, scrap welfare benefits, deregulate financial markets, get rid of basically everything…
And then, time and time again, they act surprised when the result is chaos, unemployment, poverty, depression…
MMT tells you a monetarily sovereign nation can issue all the currency/debt it wants and nothing will happen, claiming that currency and market volatility can easily be eliminated by cancelling the capital account.
This nonsense can only be promoted by someone that does not understand that the currency collapse and creditworthiness slump are driven by domestic citizens and savers rejecting the local currency; it is not an evil conspiracy of foreign investors.
Furthermore, no nation is monetarily sovereign. It always depends on demand. Try to force use or restrict flow, and the currency is worth nothing.
And local citizens are the first to reject an increasingly worthless currency issued by an irresponsible government.
You are welcome
Hexmarks retweeted
The libertarian solution to every market failure is to remove whatever regulation was preventing the market failure from becoming substantially worse.
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Neoliberalism is Fabian socialism. Because we have governments to protect property and mop up capitalism's social mess just enough to prevent insurrection. Libertarians are possibly the most dangerously indoctrinated, miseducated and deluded cultists in modern history.
That’s far from an accurate description of reality. The 0.00001%, not the 1% of whom you speak, funded and promoted the opposite system—Fabian socialism—as a tool to promote the centralisation by which they would gain control of the world. That process is in its final stages and it’s a disaster. The decentralised economies and free markets championed by Von Hayek produced far less inequality than the corporatist system we now confront.
Hexmarks retweeted
A throwaway tweet from Warren Mosler contains more useful economic information than the entire collected works of Ludwig von Mises.
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One in which ALL politicians link 'tax payers' money to social outcomes.'
Why go to the trouble of managing pogroms when you convince people to willingly destroy themselves and attack one another in tandem.
Hexmarks retweeted
You people exist in an ideological fantasy world. You've invented a simple causal logic that bears no relation to reality and predicts outcomes that never materialise. US builders target the median income bracket, and even through LIHTC only 12% of units built for low-income families cater for extremely low income renters below 30% of the median, resulting in a 7.2 million unit shortfall, only 35 units for every 100 renters. Relaxing regulations and reducing compliance costs would make little difference - the issue is lack of profitability and incentive. The reality is that capitalism not only cannot work for the poorest but, without heavy redistributive intervention, actively works against them. Not absolute poverty but a miserable, humiliating and stressful existence. Ideologues construct yet another individualised yet generalised fantasy logic - laziness, bad decisions etc. - to justify this inevitable systemic outcome. We now have to suffer this fantasy-logic relentlessly trotted out by AI. There is no 'debate' here - you people simply must be beaten and recede into history. Nothing less will do.
Hexmarks retweeted
NEW EP! 🤓
Every new gadget resets what counts as a basic need, then you're told to keep up. @Suitpossum and @sdgrumbine take apart the "high score" view of progress, the Nerd Reich, and who owns the assets behind it.
realprogressives.org/mnc-pod…
Hexmarks retweeted
A nation that creates its own currency can never go broke on debt in its own currency. It can spend as much as it needs to meet the needs up to its ability to create or acquire real resources. It taxes money out of the system. So it is always spending new money & always removing old money with taxes. Thats the system.
Hexmarks retweeted
The question here is - does Rachel actually know she's talking complete nonsense or does she believe it? Money that doesn't exist?? Issuing public or private credit creates money, a fact confimed by that wacky fringe anarcho-commie organisation called the Bank of England.
“Next year he actually has to find the money that doesn’t exist.”
“There are things the Government can do that aren’t just about tax.”
Rachel Wolf, who co-wrote the 2019 Conservative manifesto and Paul Nowak, TUC General Secretary, discuss the challenge facing Andy Burnham’s government, ahead of next week’s Budget
#Newsnight
Hexmarks retweeted
So,
-Governments create money out of nothing when they make a payment.
-There is no default risk for sovereign governments.
-There is no relation from the level of public debt to interest rates.
-Governments can eliminate poverty and unemployment if they wish.
Hexmarks retweeted
The fundamental difference between the US and China is that in China this bunch of jumped-up barrow-boys and computer nerds wouldn't be allowed anywhere near the President and political decision-making.
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When will @martinwolf_ admit that #MMT was right all along? A currency issuer cannot run out of numbers like an editor cannot run out of letters. This debate is a colossal waste of time and resources. Let's discuss society's problems and how to fix them instead.
