A Closer Look at MMT: An Interview with Rohan Grey

I met Rohan Grey on Twitter. He responded to a tweet of mine claiming that increased government spending would eventually scare investors in treasuries- crowding the government's spending capacity. Grey answered in this thread which I found incredibly interesting- it's worth a read. At any rate, I was so taken with the conversation that I reached out to see if we could talk more. Grey was kind enough to grant me a full interview on the somewhat infamous Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)

For context, Rohan Grey is a scholar and assistant professor of law at Willamette University in Oregon. He has published several academic articles, whitepapers, and opinion editorials on inflation, bond markets, finance, debt crises, and fiscal policy. His writing has been featured in magazines like The Nation and The Financial Times and he has a forthcoming book entitled, Digitizing the Dollar: The Battle for the Soul of Public Money in the Age of Cryptocurrency. He is prolific and knowledgeable, to say the least.

Before I proceed, I want to ensure that we are all on the same page. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is a heterodox (not mainstream) economic theory. Its proponents posit that governments which print their own currency, issue debt in that currency, and do not convert that currency into other things of value (like gold), cannot go bankrupt. These governments it calls monetary sovereigns. Monetary sovereigns are not restricted by deficits in the traditional sense. Instead, they can spend up until they generate demand-led inflation which outpaces the benefits of additional spending. They can then use a portfolio of tools like taxation and private credit regulation to dampen this inflation. This is to say that the primary constraint on a monetary sovereign is not the deficit, but the inflation generated by spending past the capacity of real resources. Government spending is, of course, not the only source of demand-led inflation. Regardless of cause, an MMT "monetary sovereign" has a greater capacity to manage inflation than traditional macroeconomics indicates.

Hence, contrary to mainstream economics, MMT says that public debt is not a bad thing. Instead, it represents the total amount of government assets injected into the economy. In other words, it is a source of investment for the nongovernmental sector. This intuition is derived from the sectoral balances framework which you can read more about here. MMT challenges more of mainstream economics than government spending limits, but for now this summary will suffice. If you have more questions, I would point you to Stephanie Kelton's book The Deficit Myth or her academic paper Functional Finance.

With the above summary in mind, we can move to my talk with Professor Grey. It revolved around three themes: 1) the relative effectiveness of monetary and fiscal policy for managing aggregate demand and inflation; 2) the bond market, its role in deficit spending, and the constraints on that spending from an MMT perspective; and 3) responses to critiques. My objective in this interview, was both to clarify points of confusion for myself as well as to present many of the objections to MMT which I felt missed the point.

I hope this interview is as clarifying for you as it was for me.

Monetary and Fiscal Policy

Traditionally, fiscal policy has been the domain of the legislature. Whereas, monetary policy has been left to technocrats. This bifurcation seems to endow monetary policy with an opacity and unassailability to the general public. Thus, people like to see monetary policy left to the experts.

The predominant view among these experts is that, given the correct interest rate, the economy can move closer to equilibrium between aggregate supply and aggregate demand, leading to full employment. Even Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, affirms this relationship. Importantly, Krugman claims an independent central bank can make changes to the interest rate which induce full employment independent of fiscal policy. However, Stephanie Kelton explained in a response to Krugman that, at times, the interest rate may have contradictory effects which prevent full employment.

As a student of neoclassical economics this idea was new to me. So I posed the question to Grey: how is monetary policy ineffective and how could fiscal policy help replace it?

Grey responded, "what MMT says is that, when it comes to managing demand, the typical interest rate tools that we use for monetary policy are not effective, because they can become impotent. For example, if you make an interest rate change and the underlying economic conditions are not favorable to more lending-- that is to say there's low consumer demand there's a lot of slack in the economy-- you could make the price of credit cheaper but that doesn't mean people will automatically take advantage of that." 

This seems true, especially lately. Global interest rates have been declining for the past three decades and central banks are trying to stimulate their economies by making lending increasingly cheap, but growth has nonetheless plodded. This seems to indicate, at the very least, that interest rates are not yet low enough to be binding. But what about when they are low enough? Is Krugman right that interest rates are a good tool for full employment in "normal" circumstances? 

"Even where interest rates are effective, they can have multiple contradictory effects. On one hand you have the effect on the price of credit, but to affect that price you are paying a positive rate on government liabilities, whether that's treasury bonds and securities or whether that's interest on reserves. in both instances the way you set a positive interest rate policy is you pay interest from the government. The fiscal channel works in the opposite direction to the interest rate channel."

So, according to Grey, as the government pays its liabilities at the new interest rate-- which we assume is higher to control demand-- it puts dollars into the economy at that higher rate of interest and thus partially undermines the conceit of the new rate. Grey explained that this contradictory effect can work in the other direction as well:

Assume the interest rate is lowered to increase demand. As Stephanie Kelton writes on her blog, "You can’t simply assume borrowers will always have the appetite for more private debt, even if you make it really cheap to borrow." Hence, even with lower interest, private enterprise will not automatically demand more funds. To borrow a common idiom: you can't push a rope.

Grey proposes replacing some--but not all-- of interest rate manipulation with fiscal policy. "There are not the same impotent or contradictory effects with fiscal policy." He said. "That is not to say that MMT says that fiscal policy is the only way to manage demand. That's the misconception." 

Now, you might have the same objection I had: that the government is far too inefficient to manage fiscal policy the way the Federal Reserve does monetary policy. Grey was quick to respond:

"Often the straw man that you hear is that MMT wants everything to be done by legislatures. But, If you can create an independent statutory agency that can adjust interest rates, you can create an agency that can adjust spending or adjust tax rates or adjust other regulations that could change the level of demand in the economy."

Thus, Grey is asking the simple question: why should it only be the interest rate which is managed outside of Congress? If we could create automatically adjusting mechanisms, we might be able to bypass the lethargy of political deliberation entirely. Whether or not this is possible is not the argument and whether or not it's desirable is for future debate.

While these explanations were helpful, I was not yet satisfied. Perhaps the interest rate is less efficient than I first thought. But why would so many economists advocate for interest rate targeting? Why would Krugman, arguably the most influential economist in the US, claim that if we were to only find the right rate we could create full employment? To better understand this, and Grey's response, we need to investigate the economic modeling which produces this intuition.

Krugman, in the article cited above, argues that full employment is a function of the money market, the interest rate, and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). These variables are derived from the classic macroeconomic IS-LM model pictured below:

The LM curve represents the money market of the economy. Here, the supply and demand for money are equilibrated based on the interest rate target or money supply target which the central bank can select. Equilibria which exist at higher levels of GDP will necessarily demand more money which the central bank can provide either by targeting that money demand or changing the interest rate. Hence, as GDP increases, so too do the equilibria which represent the points along the upward-sloping LM curve. 

The IS curve is simpler. It charts the negative relationship between interest rates and GDP. As interest rates decrease, firms buy more capital (machines, buildings, etc.) because the cost to service the debt on capital is lower. So, as interest rates decrease, GDP increases and firms and households spend more. Thus, the IS curve is downward sloping

Where these two curves intersect is the macroeconomic equilibrium. When the economy is in equilibrium, it is theoretically at full employment.

Ok, so now we can better understand what Krugman is telling us. If the macroeconomy is not in equilibrium, the IS-LM model offers a solution: adjust the interest rate. As you can see, if the central bank simply targets the correct interest rate- which would satisfy the money market and shift the IS curve into equilibrium- the economy will use all available labor efficiently. To demonstrate this, Krugman uses the following graph:

Krugman's graph is simply restating the intuition of the IS-LM model: finding equilibrium points "C" or "B" where the economy clears is only a matter of targeting the right price for capital.

Now, as I have mentioned in previous articles, an economic model is only as good as the assumptions from which it is derived. What are the assumptions of Krugman's model? Grey explained that first, the idea that a natural interest rate for treasury bonds exists and can be targeted is wrong. He explains:

"MMT says there is no magic interest rate to create full employment". Rather, the interest rate is a result of policy. And second, the entire IS-LM model is based upon "an outdated loanable funds model and the idea that prices will adjust perfectly".

I was surprised by this. Grey was telling me that the mainstream theoretical basis of supply and demand for capital was flawed. He said, "the idea of a neutral interest rate relies on a supply and demand model, based on a production function which is incoherent".

He continued, "neoclassical economics requires that capital be scarce, for it to work. It's based on marginal productivity." So to the neoclassical economist, "capital means stuff or stuff priced in money- not money itself and so there has to be a scarce amount- this is where they get these theories of crowding out." If you are familiar with this loanable funds model, you know what intuition arises from it: "if you get to full employment, you are crowding out capital. So, the only way you can get capital is by paying a higher interest rate." But Grey introduced a nuance to this idea. Rather than capital meaning "stuff", he said, we can assume "capital means money and since money is infinite (in the MMT framework), the marginal price of capital is zero." Because, he continued, "from an MMT point of view, you can never crowd out the government's ability to finance itself." 

So Grey was saying, rather than markets pricing loanable funds in a capital market with the interest rate as the price, the central bank only needs to respond to its policy obligations to raise, lower, or maintain interest rates. Of course, this is only true if there is no neutral interest rate. But according to MMT, the interest rate is always and everywhere a policy decision.

Indeed, as Grey elaborated, the US saw this in the interbank market for reserves in 2009. During the financial crisis, the Fed pumped money into the banking sector and banks were flush with reserves. When every bank in the economy has excess reserves, the price for reserves will trend downward as it is suppressed by excess supply. As prominent MMT economist Bill Mitchell explains in a blog post, if the Fed were not to offer a support rate, "interbank competition [could not] eliminate the system-wide surplus" and thus the overnight interest rate would be driven to zero. So in the current environment, the rate would drop to zero without Fed interest payments on reserves. 

To be clear, market interest rates- that is, rates for pension funds and the like- would not be zero. But, in the economy as it is, the interbank price for reserves would be pushed to zero- which is not a "neutral" rate as macroeconomic theory currently defines it.

So then, if the interest rate is decided by policy, why is there so much public consternation around rising interest rates? To answer that question, I wanted to ask Grey about the bond market. If we assume that interest rates are not determined in a market, then how could it be that so many economists are afraid of rising bond yields? 

Bond Markets and Yield Curves

From the standard economic perspective, the federal government sells bond to finance budget deficits. When the government spends more than it brings in in taxes, it sells bonds to creditors to pay for that deficit. Bond rates are then priced by supply, demand, and risk. These bonds can be held by private citizens and companies, but also by foreign governments (hence fears of debt to China). 

For creditors to be willing to purchase these bonds, they need a return on investment. Thus, the government offers payments to bond holders (called the coupon rate). Mainstream economics tells us to be deeply concerned about increasing interest rates when the government has a lot of debt. If the US continues spending, the logic goes, bond holders will become increasingly wary of the government's ability to settle liabilities. Thus, bond holders will sell bonds, decreasing their prices and raising their yields. This increases the net cost of borrowing and forces the government to pay higher interest on its debt. Increasing debt payments could ultimately lead to insolvency as the government struggles to settle all of its financial obligations.

The MMT framework for the bond market is different. It contends that it is not a market at all. Rather, the rates which the government pays on treasuries are always considered a choice. And according to Grey, this has only recently become controversial. As he told me, "there was a long time where it was explicit that rates paid on treasury bonds were a policy variable". Which is to say that no matter what "bond vigilantes" decided, the interest rate was always understood to be selected by the federal reserve. 

According to Grey, "low interest rates were good for the treasury under Truman in the 40s, but it was bad for investors." Thus, there was political pressure to raise rates. The problem was the significant backlash which would ensue if rates increased. To avoid the problem, the Federal Reserve decided to "create the 'camouflage' of market forces to hide behind." Thus, "they moved to a system where instead of setting a rate they said 'here is a market determined rate and we're going to target a middle rate for the market." 

Indeed, in her book Capitalizing on Crisis, sociology professor Greta R. Krippner explains that in the 1980s the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) decided to shift from nonborrowed reserve rate targeting to discount window borrowing as its "policy instrument". In effect, this meant the Fed was targeting a given rate of funds rather than the interest rate directly, giving the Fed political cover from "exposure to public criticism for slower growth and higher unemployment". Thus, the Fed moved from directly setting the interest rate to, as Grey put it: "adjusting at the margins".

According to Grey, there are relics in the Fed's arsenal from the older, more direct power it once had. For instance, if the rates term structure of the economy is pushing future yields too high, the Fed can simply buy long-term bonds and sell short-term bonds, thereby increasing the price of long-term bonds and lowering the yield. This is called "Operation Twist" and is an explicit sign that the Fed can control the yield curve and the interest rate.

Therefore, MMT says that the Fed is only ever allowing a free-floating bond market as a choice, rather than from lack of power. As Grey said, "From MMT's point of view, the government is always creating the entire yield curve. The only question is how explicit and how intentional it is in those actions." So Grey was presenting an alternative to the neoclassical story of government debt and the bond market. Where mainstream economics proposes a beggar government which must go to creditors to finance its spending, MMT says the government and Federal Reserve are always in control of the bond market, the rates paid on those bonds, the long term structure of those bonds, and whether those bonds are issued at all.

Some Critiques 

Most criticism of MMT appears to emerge from other heterodox schools. It seems this is a consequence of both the orthodox economists ignoring the nonmainstream and a lively inter-heterodox debate culture. Thus, when long-form critique of MMT does emerge, it is from smaller economic schools. As such, I decided to pick critiques from prominent Austrian economist Robert Murphy. I collected a handful of his articles and pulled some of the critiques I found most interesting and presented them to Grey.

Before I begin this segment in earnest, I want to briefly explain the theoretical framework of the Austrian school. Austrians believe in free markets above nearly all else. Their approach to economic analysis begins with the individual and their choices in a market structure. The individual, to the Austrian, is an approximately rational actor with unlimited desires. As such, these actors seek to satisfy their needs and desires by buying and selling goods and services. Each choice they make is (for reasons of theoretical parsimony) on the margin and on a pairwise basis. The concept is explained thusly:

Imagine there are three goods, good A, good B, and good C. A rational actor will first choose (marginally) between A and B (a pairwise decision). Say they decide that good A is preferable. Then, the actor moves to consider between A and C. The actor then decides they prefer C and thus decides to purchase good C. This is a marginal, pairwise decision. It is significant, because it ensures that all actors have definite preferences between goods, make those preferences known more or less precisely through consumption, and have a self-evident choice architecture which structures their choices in a subjective hierarchy.

Given such a system of choices, it is then reasonable to assume that actors choose goods to consume in a systematic way which structures prices. If all actors are behaving as described, prices of goods (through supply and demand) will function as signals to be analyzed. Importantly, Austrians believe that prices are subjective to individuals and are not objectively formed by the costs of inputs or any other such factor. Hence, prices are vitally important to understanding the true functioning of the market and any interference by the government will distort the messages these prices are implicitly sending. 

This fear of distortion also underlies the Austrian opposition to Federal Reserve stabilization measures. To the Austrian, the price of lending (the interest rate) is also naturally determined by markets. Money to lend is optimally allocated and the prices within the market convey important information to rational actors. So then, when the Fed lowers interest rates in a slump, it is distorting the price of lending downward, leading to irrationally optimistic investments which only deepen the recession in the long-run. 

You might see how this theoretical understanding of prices, markets, and the Fed puts Austrians and MMTers at odds. It was thus an excellent school from which to draw criticism of MMT and to use as a source for questions for Grey.

The critiques of MMT that I pulled from Robert Murphy were the following: 1) MMT is wrong that printing money only has an opportunity cost at full employment; 2) MMT has a bad definition of  "net savings" in the government accounting identities framework; and 3) MMT is mistaken in its treatment of government treasuries as "money". 

The Opportunity Cost of Money Printing

MMT posits that the primary constraint on government spending is inflation and while there are many sources and kinds of inflation, the kind that comes from a general excess of demand is only a problem at full resource use. Thus, when there are people unemployed and resources are laying idle, money creation can help bring those resources back into the productive economy and smooth the boom-bust cycle. 

Murphy's problem with this is odd. First, he acknowledges that inflation is a primary constraint on governments which are monetary sovereigns. But, he goes on to say that MMTers are wrong "when they claim that printing money only carries an opportunity cost when the economy is at full employment". The argument is odd because it is not really what the theory states. Rather, MMT posits that the government is constrained by inflation and that all spending carries with it an opportunity cost.

Grey explained that the first thing to understand is Murphy's starting assumption: the private sector always (nearly) perfectly allocates resources. If one begins here, then any intervention by an outside actor will divert needed resources away from what the market deems efficient. To this, Grey responded that in Murphey's view, anything beyond "having one guy and a mailing address making sure that there's enough money flowing into the rest of the economy, is taking resources away from private uses". 

Indeed, Grey says that the idea of the opportunity cost as Murphy proposes it is "true, but trivial." Obviously, if you use resources for one thing, there are other things which those resources could have been used for. This is the marginal opportunity cost which is inherent to economic thinking, including in MMT. However, Grey points out that at the level of the macroeconomy, this might not be a helpful paradigm. For example, Grey explained that opportunity costs are not, by necessity, negative in sum. He gave a plausible example of five workers, all who could work on individual products by themselves. However, suppose if they work together they are more productive than the aggregate productivity of their individual work. Then, the net opportunity cost is actually not a "cost" at all, but a net benefit to the society.

This net benefit is part of what MMT calls "the public purpose". Grey explained that "there are benefits to collective coordination that result in increased productive capacity in excess of the sum of society's individual parts … and MMT would argue that an economy running at full employment, with maximum productive capacity, is likely to be far more positive sum than one that expects the private sector alone to be responsible for employment and investment."

So, in his criticism Murphy has conflated two things: inflation risk and opportunity cost. Grey acknowledged that the former exists at full employment and the latter exists for any decision. These, Grey explained, are not contradictory ideas.

Net Savings Identity

Murphy's second challenge revolves around accounting identities of government spending and savings. As a warning, this component of MMT criticism gets quite complicated, even as it emerges from a relatively simple place. For this reason, I will give you the general criticism, the response from Grey, and then a handful of resources for you to use to further investigate this issue for yourself.

To begin, we need to first define our identities. The pertinent equation is as follows: 

Y= C+I+G. 

This equation represents the accounting structure of the economy, assuming that the economy is closed to trade. "Y" is national income (sometimes Gross Domestic Product) "C" is consumption or what money is spent in the economy, "I" is investment or what money is invested, and "G" is total government spending. 

Therefore, the MMT proposition is that since:

S =Y-T-C 

(that is, total savings is just that money which is not taxed from people "T" nor used for consumption "C") then Savings minus Investment must be equal to Government Spending minus Taxes, or:

S-I=G-T. 

Hence, MMT derives its central argument from accounting tautologies: government debt is nongovernmental surplus. Or put another way, when government spending is larger than total tax receipts (G>T) the right side of the previous equation increases which, by virtue of logical form, requires the left side to increase as well.

Now, Murphy finds this logic odd as it seems that when the federal government runs a surplus (government spending is smaller than tax receipts or G<T) then MMT is saying that no one in the economy can save. Murphy explains this is obviously wrong and the mistake is the MMT definition of Net Savings. Rather than defining Net Savings as total savings minus total borrowing, MMT (according to Murphy) seems to define Net Savings as total savings minus total investment. Murphy says that MMT is right that private savings minus private investment cannot grow without a budget deficit, but that it essentially does not matter because the benefit of private savings is that it is used for private investment.

Grey explained that from an MMT perspective, "Net Savings" can be described as net financial assets. For instance, if you were to put money in the bank, that action creates both a liability on the bank's balance sheet and an asset on your personal balance sheet, which nets out to zero. Also, if you own government debt and "you consolidate the government and everybody else, that nets out to zero." But, he continued "that does not make sense because the government issues the money and so it has an infinity sign on its asset side". The difference here, Grey said, is that Murphy would consider increased bank savings as increased net savings, whereas MMT only counts net increases in financial assets. Grey admitted that increased bank deposits are considered wealth, but from an MMT point of view, "in the long-run, if the way that growth happens is the growth of private sector liabilities, so that the way households save is that banks and corporations go into more debt, that creates an unstable dynamic long-term." Therefore, he continued, "having the growth of the economy purely come from private sector indebtedness to itself is long-term unstable. It's not that you cannot do it, it's that it creates an increasingly financialized economy where there is growing private leverage."

The idea that an economy will become financialized and run up unsustainable private debts was first popularized by economist Hyman Minsky (1919-1996). Perhaps Minsky's most important contribution to economics was his Financial Instability Hypothesis. In Minsky's time (and now, to some extent) the common understanding was that the economy was equilibrium-seeking, self-regulating and stable. Minsky's hypothesis challenged this view, positing that the economy actually went through cycles of distinct income-debt relationships. First, the economy begins as equilibrium-seeking and stable. Then, as confidence grows, banks (which seek a profit) begin lending against assets which are appreciating in value and in contracts where many borrowers cannot pay principle. Inevitably, the system crashes as borrowers become unable to pay principle or interest, unstable loans collapse, and confidence in the system diminishes. This inherent fragility of the private sector, a proclivity for increasing levels of debt, is the long-term instability Grey is referencing above. Thus, it is possible for the economy to grow on private leverage, but it is unstable in the long-run and so the government injects financial assets to support the system. These financial assets are equal to the government's deficit. 

Indeed, in a debate on a blog post Warren Mosler, the founder of MMT, said essentially the same thing:

"Government deficits equal non-government accumulation of net financial assets denominated in that currency. I have also called it savings of net financial assets of that currency. You can call it anything you want".

Now, the debate over the definition of Savings is extensive in the economics "blogosphere". I am not well-versed enough in it to explain further. So, here are a few links to discussions (in the comment sections) about it if you would like to further examine the issue: MMT Bask, MMT's Very Odd Definition of "Savings", MMT Bleg.

Ultimately, a lot of people much smarter than I are debating the issue and I would encourage you to look into it, if this is interesting to you.

"Green Money" and "Yellow Money"

In The Deficit Myth, Kelton distinguishes between two types of money: green and yellow. Green money is the type everyone knows: paper bills, coins, bank deposits, etc. But Kelton says that government debt, or Treasury bonds are also a type of money, yellow money. She makes this point to illustrate that government debt is simply savings in the hands of the nongovernmental sector. Like a savings account, Kelton argues that a Treasury is a safe place to store money. In this way, Kelton reframes the national debt as a massive tally of savings accounts, rather than a debt hanging over US citizens.

While Murphy has many objections to this, his argument can be summarized in a quote where he writes: "you can’t spend government bonds in the grocery store. That’s why money and debt are different things". In essence, Murphy tells us that money and debt are different because they function differently in the economy.

 

Grey responded using savings accounts as an example. "50 years ago, you couldn't spend money from your savings account. But, you could move money from your savings account to your checking account. So, if I have money in my savings account, do I not have money? Or is it that I have money in a slightly less convenient medium?" 

This was an interesting insight. If we imagine government bonds, as Kelton does, as analogous to a savings account from which we can draw-- what distinguishes the two? But surely, it is better to have cash on hand than it is to have it stored away in a savings account or a bond? 

Grey continued: "We often think of this [liquidity problem] as the difference between money and bonds, but this also happens between money. For instance, say I have a $100 bill and I'm at a vending machine. For the purpose in front of me, that money is useless. What I need to do is find an exchange to convert it into the kind of money that I want". 

Ok, so Grey was telling me that the convertibility of money, far from being a problem only for bonds, is actually a continuous problem because "the form that money takes always depends on the context that you want to use it for". Thus, simply to say that one cannot spend bonds in a grocery store is no more an argument that bonds are not money than saying you cannot buy a car with a billion pennies. The context is the important factor. This is true with bonds: in many contexts, having bonds is inconvenient-- but in the financial market it is more useful than having cash. Thus, much like a savings account, bonds are swappable for other forms of money and are therefore just as "real".

Now, before I conclude this segment, a caveat: this is by no means an exhaustive critique of MMT. I was, of course, limited by time and knowledge. What I hope is that this segment proved useful for those curious about MMT or for those who have yet to see it explained in detail.

Conclusion

As much as some politicians and economists would like it, MMT is not going away. It appears that the pandemic has created a generation of incredible public debt. Nearly all developed countries have expanded their deficits to support demand in the aftermath of lockdowns and in the face of emerging supply shortages.

I think now more than ever, understanding MMT, how it works, and what its critiques are, is important. As government debt becomes a second thought and as inflation seems to be reemerging (for now), the public discourse will increasingly reflect MMT's intuitions, arguments, and weaknesses. More progressive politicians are in regular contact with MMT economists and Kelton's The Deficit Myth has demonstrated a public desire for this type of thinking. 

Thus, I hope you found my conversation with Grey informative. If you want to read more by Grey or better understand his perspective, you can find his work at The Modern Money Network, an organization he founded to offer information about MMT.

Regardless of its future, MMT is becoming more and more influential. In my opinion then, it is best to fully understand it and its implications if any of us are to write, vote on, or advocate for, effective public policies in the future.