I note with some cynicism that there has been no apparent push by economists to promote workers as primary owners of companies, for example. I suspect pervasive co-op style businesses combined with a reasonably permissive lending environment would be absolute economic powerhouses.

That sort of research no doubt happens, but it gets no airplay compared to people pushing branches of Keynesianism or Modern Monetary Theory.

I think you have this the wrong way around. Mainstream economic theory (the neo-liberal kind) actually leads to the control of government by private capital. What you will see coming out of the top schools (especially Chicago) but many others too is theory that pushes for de-regulation, privatization, free flow of capital, laissez-faire etc. The exact opposite of government control over industry.

> no apparent push by economists to promote workers as primary owners of companies for example

This is (probably) true, but the reasons are again quite simple and don't involve the state very much. Great concentrations of wealth are built and maintained by keeping capital ownership in as few hands as possible. Since academic economists are often beholden to big capital owners (in one way or another), they will of course promote theories that justify and encourage concentration of ownership, not its dispersal among the workers.

> it gets no airplay compared to people pushing branches of Keynesianism or Modern Monetary Theory

MMT especially is not at all a mainstream theory. I would say most economists consider it at best "heterodox" and often either don't know much about it or strongly disagree with it.

AFAICT, the descriptive aspects of MMT are widely accepted, if deemphasized in prescriptive contexts, aspects of mainstream economic theory (not just [neo-]Keynesian, but across essentially the whole spectrum of descriptive economics.) The prescriptions that MMT adherents make based on those descriptive aspects are out of line with mainstream prescriptions, which tend to honor what MMT loudly points out (and mainstream economics more quietly acknowledges) is the fiction of the finite public purse.

Take the very basic thing that you mention at the end, which should be absolutely non-controversial: the US government cannot be forced into default.

If your prescriptions are just going to ignore that fact, then have you truly accepted it? I'd argue that no, you really haven't.

(That doesn't mean you'd have to follow the prescriptions of MMTers necessarily, e.g. the Job Guarantee is certainly not a logically necessary conclusion of the fact that a sovereign government cannot go bankrupt. But your whole framing around government spending and revenue really does need to be centered around this observation, or you're simply bound to fall into fuzzy and incorrect thinking all the time.)

The US government 'can't default' but that is basically word games for a complicated tax where nobody is quite certain who is paying. The government is definitely consuming real resources and unlike a tax it isn't at all obvious who would have gotten those resources had the government not redirected them. I'd rather governments were straightforward and levied taxes to pay for things so we know who is supporting state spending.

The conversation really hinges on the semantics of 'default' - in real terms the Government absolutely can default. At some point the country has collapsed, there is nothing left to give (see classic hyperinflation cases) and the government will not make good on its debts. In nominal terms the government can't default but anyone who treats that as useful in their decision making is going to lose out sooner or later when it comes back to real goods and services. I don't want to be one of those people, and I don't want there to be any people like that because it seems dishonest at some level to pretend they aren't losing out.

People call US bonds 'risk free' - that is only in nominal terms. In real terms they are actually quite risky. Take on a 30 year treasury bond today and there isn't any certainty how much it will be worth in 2020 dollars as it matures. Is it a likely net win on the sandwich scale? Signs point to no, but it might be. There are risks.

The next steps are to recognize and integrate into the conversation that:

* Whether and to what extent the government consumes resources that would otherwise have been consumed by somebody else cannot be determined purely by looking at the deficit as a single number. A government deficit, when done right, stimulates the economy which means that it causes the creation of resources that otherwise simply wouldn't have been created.

* Inflation, which is what you're really getting at, is complicated and has many potential drivers. A government deficit can be one of them, but isn't necessarily. There are many other potential drivers: overly lax monetary policy, excessive bank lending, entirely internal mechanism such as genuine supply shocks, businesses' price hikes in an attempt to increase profits, strong unions helping drive up wages broadly across the economy, and so on. Note that some of these effects, especially the last one, are actually desirable for most people, meaning that inflation can actually be a good thing for society overall! Admittedly that happens rarely in practice, but that's really a function of workers having too little power. It all depends on the details.

In fact, on that last point there's reason to suspect that we'd have had quite a bit lower "effective" inflation (meaning higher purchasing power of wages / salary) for the majority of the population today if governments had decided to address the Global Financial Crisis by direct job creation and handing out money to the population at large, rather than leaning on monetary policy which really only caused asset prices to balloon.

This alternative policy wasn't even discussed seriously, because people largely do not understand that the government cannot default. Discussion was shut down with slogans like "making sure that the US is not going to be the next Greece", which are complete nonsense given that the US and Greek governments operate under very different currency arrangements (sovereign currency like Japan, vs. the effectively foreign currency of the Euro in Greece's case).

So anyway, the point is that the framing in real resources matters significantly, precisely because there is no ironclad correlation between government deficits and real resources. People need to learn to go into the real resources framing and then stay there.

That's a tautological and zero-sum way to look at it

Regarding the 0-sum aspect, I don't know how else you can look at it. Ownership of capital has to follow a certain distribution, which can in turn be more or less egalitarian, depending on how we decide to set the system up. it's however not possible to have both concentrated ownership and co-op style ownership at the same time (for the same company).

Only in the sense of "industry control over government". Which doesn't strike me as any improvement.

The true opposite would be "industry has to fend for itself without being able to co-opt government to tilt the playing field in its favor".

Sure, good point. However I don't think it's possible or desirable to let industry be completely independent of the state. It seems to me that would lead us right back to our current predicament - power would concentrate and it would start putting pressure on the state.

The state itself is a concentration of power. Industry wants to co-opt it for that very reason.

Ideally though, all concentrations of power should be dismantled.

Whatever power you use to reduce concentrations of power would undoubtedly become quite powerful.

I think that it's probably better to attempt to reduce the size of any one concentration of power, and set them all up watching each other.

Agreed. It would be great if power was as decentralised as possible and if individuals would take an active part in their (self-)government.

Based on what? The data seems to point in the opposite direction: successful, innovative businesses are driven by singular leadership. Apple since Steve Jobs died has not only lost much of its innovative spark, but quality has plummeted. See also Tesla, Amazon, etc.

I don't like the implications of that, but I see little evidence pointing in the other direction.

Hrm, I think it depends on what they meant by co-op style (as in the previous sentence they say "primarily worker owned"). I agree singular leadership and direction is important, but that's not necessarily at odds with primarily worker owned, even if it's at odds with some versions of worker owned.

An example of a company that has multiple CEOs that have driven it to success in different times and in slightly different contexts would by Microsoft. Originally helmed by Gates in a manner somewhat similar to Jobs and Musk, it's now helmed by Nadella to great success. I would count that due to Nadella having a singular vision, and buy in from the company so he can achieve that. I'm not sure being worker owned (other than it being kind of hard to keep it that way once you get large enough...) would change that as long as he still had the confidence of the board (which in that case would be a council of workers I guess?).

Another way to think of this might be the (traditional) American auto industry. While not worker owned, as I understand it the unions have quite a lot of power (including board seats), and that might be seen as somewhat of a proxy for large successful (significantly) worker owned companies, and those have gone through periods of great success at times as well.

Your evidence doesn't quite say what you think it does; you are talking about day-to-day management, I'm talking about ownership structure and how day-to-day management gets appointed/fired.

But no specific evidence, just first principles reasoning. It is hard to see why it would do badly.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/steve-jobs-original-apple...

There are concrete examples of worker-dominated organizations: schools, public transit entities, etc., where powerful worker unions dominate policy. They are almost universally unsuccessful, as worker interests take precedence over delivering a product to the consumer.

I suppose we have trailed things like worker ownership in early stage startups with high equity compensation. That might be evidence that it works well. Letting workers capture most of the value they create would be at least as interesting experiment for me than Universal Basic Income; but I think UBI has much more coverage as a political idea.

If this were the case, the United States would have adopted full-on UBI socialism decades ago. Or at least, the net taker states would have prioritized advocating for that sort of thing. What we've actually seen is the complete opposite to your theory.

The actual incentives that politicians have are not to their constituents, but to their sponsors.

As someone else pointed out, MIT is one of the top 5 departments, while Yale is generally not considered to be in that group. The list of departments with Nobel Prize winners shows that there are plenty of good departments: Harvard, MIT, NYU, Yale, Chicago, Princeton, UCLA, Stanford, Northwestern, Berkeley, Minnesota, Columbia, Arizona State, Carnegie Mellon, San Diego, Arizona...that's just in recent years.

Was that sentence necessary? There are so many conspiracy theories about Epstein that its not clear what you are expressing here and I'm not sure I care to know.