The Deficit Myth
Modern Monetary Theory and How to Build a Better Economy
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Add to basket failed.
Please try again later
Add to wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Remove from wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Adding to library failed
Please try again
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
£0.00 for first 30 days
LIMITED TIME OFFER
Get 3 months for £0.99/mo
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.
The Deficit Myth
Narrated by:
Stephanie Kelton
Buy Now for £12.99
-
Narrated by:
-
Stephanie Kelton
-
By:
-
Stephanie Kelton
About this listen
In a world of epic, overlapping crises, Stephanie Kelton is an indispensable source of moral clarity ... the truths that she teaches about money, debt, and deficits give us the tools we desperately need to build a safe future for all. Read it - then put it to use. - Naomi Klein
The leading thinker and most visible public advocate of modern monetary theory - the freshest and most important idea about economics in decades - delivers a radically different, bold, new understanding for how to build a just and prosperous society.
Any ambitious proposal - ranging from fixing crumbling infrastructure to Medicare for all or preventing the coming climate apocalypse - inevitably sparks questions: how can we afford it? How can we pay for it? Stephanie Kelton points out how misguided those questions really are by using the bold ideas of modern monetary theory (MMT), a fundamentally different approach to using our resources to maximize our potential as a society.
We've been thinking about government spending in the wrong ways, Kelton argues, on both sides of the political aisle. Everything that both liberal/progressives and conservatives believe about deficits and the role of money and government spending in the economy is wrong, especially the fear that deficits will endanger long-term prosperity.
Through illuminating insights about government debt, deficits, inflation, taxes, the financial system, and financial constraints on the federal budget, Kelton dramatically changes our understanding of how to best deal with important issues ranging from poverty and inequality to creating jobs and building infrastructure. Rather than asking the self-defeating question of how to pay for the crucial improvements our society needs, Kelton guides us to ask: which deficits actually matter? What is the best way to balance the risk of inflation against the benefits of a society that is more broadly prosperous, safer, cleaner, and secure?
With its important new ways of understanding money, taxes, and the critical role of deficit spending, MMT busts myths that prevent us from taking action because we can't get beyond the question of how to pay for it.
'The best book on rethinking economics that anyone will find right now.' - Richard Murphy, Political Economist and author of The Joy of Tax
(P)2020 Hachette Audio©2020 Stephanie Kelton
Listeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
Kelton is to modern monetary theory what Milton Friedman was to American conservatives for a half century - conversational, fierce, relentless.
Kelton's game-changing book on the myths around government deficits is both theoretically rigorous and empirically entertaining. It reminds us that money is not limited, only our imagination of what to do with it. After you read it you will never think of the public purse as a household economy again. Read it! (Mariana Mazzucato, author of The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy)
In a world of epic, overlapping crises, Stephanie Kelton is an indispensable source of moral clarity ... the truths that she teaches about money, debt, and deficits give us the tools we desperately need to build a safe future for all. Read it - then put it to use. (Naomi Klein)
The best book on rethinking economics that anyone will find right now.
In the wake of the financial impact of the coronavirus, she's having a moment ... she's become a rock star in her field. (Ben Hoyle)
Kelton is a razor-sharp writer ... smashing shibboleths of conventional economic wisdom.
This book is going to be influential. (Martin Wolf)
One of the most important and accessible books ever written about money
Kelton's book achieves a revolution in political economy.
A leading light in modern monetary theory.
[Kelton] has succeeded in instigating a round of heretical questioning, essential for a post-Covid-19 world, where the pantheon of economic gods will have to be reconfigured.
Convincingly overturns the conventional wisdom that federal budget deficits are somehow bad
The most talked about economics book of 2020
A remarkable book both in content and timing. A 'must read' that is sure to influence many aspects of policymaking going forward (Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic advisor at Allianz)
The main disappointment is its truly woeful treatment of trade. Kelton relates the tale of a motorcycle factory that got shut down despite millions being simultaneously lavished on dividends and stock buybacks. She announces that the response to this should be the federal jobs guarantee (JG)— in other words, the workers should leave their colleagues and be assigned minimum wage ($15) work in an entirely different sector (she suggests ‘care’) with a transient bunch of other laid-off workers. All the while, both the workers’ skills and the capital stock tied up in the factory atrophy.
This is senseless from an MMT perspective: the aim according to which is to make the full use of the skills, infrastructure and resources of the society.
Instead, the currency-issuing government should intervene to purchase the factory building and capital stock, set it up an employee-owned business run by the existing workforce, and pay them all the JG rate for a given period while they work out how to use their skills and equipment to produce something again. Thus their skills and resources are retained, their dignity enhanced.
As mentioned, Kelton sees the JG as mainly providing jobs in the social & environmental care sector. She doesn’t seem to envisage that the JG could be used for import substitution. Yet the less a country needs to import, the less it needs to worry about exchange rates, and thus to an extent the less it needs to worry about the big constraint on central government money issuance, inflation.
This leads to the other deeply conventional aspect of Kelton’s book. If inflation is the constraint, what should its rate be? She doesn’t answer. Plainly we want predictable prices that don’t change so swiftly that we are in a perpetual panic, but what predictable, manageable rate should we aim at?
The question immediately pitches us into what Kelton studiously avoids: class politics. If you are a debtor, high inflation inflates your debt away; if you are a creditor high inflation inflates your assets away. There is an inalienable class tension here. Kelton emotes at tedious length about the problems of indebtedness, but unless I fell asleep through something interesting, her response is deeply conventional: less unemployment! Better-paying jobs! Etc. Which has little bearing on MMT per se. What does is using currency issuance and inflation targets to reduce indebtedness.
This lack of class analysis is all the more grating given her insouciance about trade deficits. If you import more than you export then the difference is made up through sales of assets to foreign investors. Assets such as real estate, which pushes up the price of housing and thus the indebtedness of homeowners.
Well, enough. The book gives an insight into a revolutionary way of looking at the economy, but the writer is at home in convention.
A very conventional revolutionary
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Best book on monetary policy
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Phenomenal
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Behind the myths: How the economy REALLY works
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Perhaps too a complex subject to try and solve in a book but still worth listening to, just to get a different view of monetary issues.
Interesting perspective on a complex subject
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.