This paper by PERI Co-Director Gerald Epstein considers some of the central limitations of Modern Money Theory (MMT), including with respect to international financial markets. Epstein argues that these constraints are much more binding on the policy applicability of MMT than many MMT advocates appear to recognize. To address these limitations, MMT analysts would have to enter the messy institutional, policy and empirical realms that undermine their simplistic policy proposals. Epstein concludes that, in light of these limitations, MMT’s major policy suggestions are of little practical relevance for progressive macroeconomic policymaking.

>> Read Epstein's blog critique, "Is MMT 'America First' Economics?" 

This book by James K. Boyce on the environment, inequality and the economy, argues that there is not an inexorable trade-off between advancing human well-being and having a clean and safe environment. The goal of economic policy should be to grow the good things that improve our well-being and environmental quality and reduce the bad things that harm humans and nature. To reorient the economy for these ends, we will need to achieve a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power. Global climate change – the most pressing environmental challenge of our time – adds urgency to this task and creates historic opportunities for moving towards a greener future.

This new book, co-edited by PERI researcher Shouvik Chakraborty, presents an overview of the state of the Indian economy immediately prior to the country’s April 11 national election. Professor Prabhat Patnaik writes that Quantum Leap in the Wrong Direction provides “a great service to the Indian people who are about to participate in what is undoubtedly the most decisive election in our recent history. To choose wisely the people need to be correctly informed about the state of the country. And information is precisely what is being denied to them…. Quantum Leap has sought to present a true picture of the performance of the Modi government.”