Welcome to Trial of the Pyx. I am a PhD candidate in the History of Consciousness department at UC Santa Cruz, specializing in political philosophy and monetary history. In this newsletter — named after the ancient ceremony at which English monetary authorities sampled, assayed, and verified the quality of the coin of the realm — I will be fact checking claims made in the literature of the neochartalist writers affiliated with the movement known as MMT or “Modern Monetary Theory.”
My title is taken from the language of the medieval minting system: mint masters, who were licensed by the crown to produce the king’s money, were allowed a “tolerance” within which their output might be allowed to deviate from the official standard, failing which they would be required to pay a “remedy” in restitution for abusing the crown’s trust. Similarly, it is my mission here to assay the historical claims made by neochartalist writers, determine whether they fall within acceptable tolerances for playing fast and loose with the facts, and — if needed — demand that they be remedied with a correction of the narrative.
It must be admitted that the assay is a destructive process: it destroys its object in the act of measuring. It might similarly be wondered whether my intention is to destroy MMT, and defend the ruling orthodoxy against its challenge. Nothing could be further from the case. I write here in the conviction that there is something about MMT that really matters, even if much of what it claims about history is wrong. My goal is not to strangle in its cradle this new discourse about money, but rather to strengthen it by challenging it to make sense of the historical record. If this challenge forces it to become something rather different than what it is now, this can only be for the better. Since MMT stakes its claim to power on the dispelling of “textbook myths” about the nature and origins of money, it is only reasonable that it should be held to account when it goes about the business of myth-making itself.
My goal here is not to forward my own theory about money and monetary politics. That task is beyond the scope of this newsletter, and will be developed in a forthcoming full-length book. Nor do I intend, here, to intervene into the terrain of contemporary politics. In “Trial of the Pyx,” I will restrain myself to following footnotes and chasing citations, one at a time, in order to ensure that the monetary history circulating in our discourses is of a true and just standard.
Watch this space for more. - CD
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