GRANVILLE, Ohio— The Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity is proud to co-sponsor the first international conference of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT, which will take place September 21-24, 2017 at the University of Missouri – Kansas City (UMKC). The theme of the conference “Economics for a New Progressive Era” highlights the important contribution of the MMT approach to public policy. MMT describes how a financially sovereign government can afford to buy anything available for sale in its own currency. MMT provides the answer to the classic “how do we pay for it?” question that we often face when we try to address any of the major public policy issues such as unemployment, poverty, climate change, public health, education, and infrastructure.
“We are very proud to be a co-sponsor of this historic event,” said Fadhel Kaboub, President of the Binzagr Institute and Associate Professor of economics at Denison University. “Our research team has put together several panels on economic development, environmental sustainability, full employment policies, teaching pedagogy, and MMT in the humanities,” he continued.
Mathew Forstater, Research Director at the Binzagr Institute and Professor of Economics at UMKC, said that “Keynote speakers, such as Keynes’s biographer, Lord Robert Skildesky, and James K. Galbraith, who heads up the Inequality Project at the LBJ School at the University of Texas in Austin, and a rare appearance by MMT founder and its intellectual leader, Warren Mosler, alone make this international conference a must-see event. But those in attendance at UMKC and the many participating via the livestream will also hear Bernie Sanders’ former chief economic adviser, Stephanie Kelton of Stony Brook University and New Economic Perspectives, billyblog’s Bill Mitchell of the Centre for Full Employment and Equity (Australia), and Randy Wray and Jan Kregel from The Levy Economics Institute.”
Scott Fullwiler, Research Scholar at the Binzagr Institute and Assistant Professor of economics at UMKC is one of the organizers of this event. “This is no ordinary conference. It isn’t even an academic conference,” wrote Fullwiler and the other two members of the organizing committee, Kelton and Wray. “With us for this event are scholars from a range of disciplines (economics, law, history, philosophy, sociology, political science, literature, and so on) but also activists, students, practitioners from the financial industry, lawmakers, journalists, and friends from the local community. The program for the next three days is filled with a diverse array of panels, covering everything from the Job Guarantee to the rise of cryptocurrencies and beyond.”
Forstater shared that “Those who have been following the development of modern money theory are aware of its crucial public policy implications in the areas of fiscal and monetary operations, especially employment and budgetary policies, but participants at this first-ever MMT International Summit at UMKC will learn the potential contributions of this unique mix of chartalism, functional finance, sectoral analysis and the job guarantee for understanding a wide variety of issues, from climate change and legal theory to zero interest rate policy and critical film studies.”
There will be live streaming video of the entire conference via this link and via the Binzagr Institute’s Facebook page and on Twitter @BinzagrInfo. Social media posts will use #MMT2017 as the main conference hashtag. A brief promotional video is available on the Institute’s YouTube channel.
The Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity is an independent public policy think-tank dedicated to the promotion of interdisciplinary research in the service of an improved quality of life for all members of society. The institute provides alternative public policy solutions that address a wide range of socio-economic problems faced by the global community. The Institute is proud of its partnership with the UMKC economics department and with Denison University.
For more information, please call 740-587-6315 or send an email to [email protected].