MMT Economic Philosophy, Debt And Yin and Yang

What Stephanie Kelton is up against in presenting the MMT position on National Debt is not just a change in economic thinking but a change at a higher conceptual frame of reference that is woven into the fabric of our society

The magnitude of the the challenge she faces is not only comparable to changing the way we think from Western philosophy of binary thinking duality to an Eastern oriented philosophy of Yin and Yang......That is the challenge she faces!

The opposing duality nature of our binary thinking to polar opposite conceptual logic of Presence/Absence is woven into all our social structures from religion to politics to education and economics.  It is the foundation of our computer system logic as well as the machines that process that logic.  While social values of Good and Evil (absence of Good) are deeply entrenched in religion they are perhaps least entrenched in computer science.  Money and Economics are heavily and historically influenced by religious social values embodied in the Social Science of economics.  

Yin and Yang school of thought is described by Wikipedia:

The concept of Yin-Yang which is often referred to in the West as "yin and yang," literally meaning "shadow and light," is used to describe how polar opposites or seemingly contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn in relation to each other.

There is a perception (especially in the West) that yin and yang correspond to evil and good. However, in Daoist metaphysics, good/bad distinctions and other dichotomous moral judgments are perceptual and not real, and yin-yang is an indivisible whole.

This is the symbolic representation of Yin and Yang:

 

This is the graph used by Stephanie Kelton to illustrate the relationship of Sector Financial Balances

Chart and following comment is from this source:

What the chart demonstrates beautifully is the symmetry that applies to the balances of a centrally controlled credit system.
That’s to say, for the US domestic private sector to carry a positive balance, the government must in effect carry a negative balance.

Comments that follow this presentation at FT reflect to various degrees the predisposition to thing in Binary True and False terms of opposition rather than Yin and Yang interdependence.  This comment by vlade "kinda" starts to get it but then decides that the MMT theory just has to reach a break point where it does not work anymore.  I can see the same struggle to "get it" in other comments attempting to overcome established thought.  Hard to do when socially we are conditioned in that mode by our logic premise choice.

Good luck Stefanie Kelton in overcoming ideas so deeply entrenched in our society by our cultural choice of fundamental logic based on perception of binary opposition rather than interdependent and interconnected relationships between two objects at the most fundamental level of logic, the point at which one exists and the other being the non-existence of that same thing.

In Yin and Yang both objects exist, one of which is not the absence of the other.

At least that is my perception of Yin and Yang, my person school of thought in a single room school house where I am the only pupil and only teacher in the room.

I believe that Yin and Yang are an Object Oriented philosophy aligned with the Object  Oriented Paradigm of computing.  Historically it came first as the foundational logic of relationships in the Computational Trinitarianism of Logic, Language and Structure.

In contrast, our Western logic basis was more functionally oriented approach based on the relationship between True and False to produce a binary value product result.

If we are what we eat, we are also what we think.

This leads me to Fuzzy Logic.  That concept appeared on the scene at approximately the same time (1960's) as the nascent ideas of Object Oriented Computing.  Fuzzy Logic seems to be more closely related to Yin and Yang that True and False.  It is based more on the premise of the seen and unseen (but there to be seen as something, not nothing).  Fuzzy Logic deals in degrees of truth which seemed fascinating to me when I learned about the concept in the 70's.  It was more like the way I looked at things.  After all this time perhaps it deserves some re-examination and updating.  Times have changed, maybe I can perceive better.

Very interesting (said in Chinese  accented English as I stroke my Fu Man Chu beard)  that the names of the authors of the paper that follows seem to be more Chinese than American.  That however is not a bi-polar true or false conclusion, just a fuzzy thinking approximation.  Am I thinking like a Chinese or just eating too much Chinese take-out?

This paper examines the comparison:  YinYang bipolar logic and bipolar fuzzy logic Wen-Ran Zhang^{a, ,} ,Lulu Zhang<sup>b

Good thing there are smarter people that me to come up with this stuff!  

Do you think that this paper was easy for them to write simply because they culturally think this way?

We are doomed!  Is that what Kruschev's wife said when she visited an American supermarket?</sup>

Abstract

It is observed that equilibrium (including quasi- or non-equilibrium) is natural reality or bipolar truth. It is asserted that a multiple valued logic is a finite-valued extension of Boolean logic; a fuzzy logic is a real-valued extension of Boolean logic; Boolean logic and its extensions are unipolar systems that cannot be directly used to represent bipolar truth for visualization. To circumvent the representational limitations of unipolar systems, a zero-order (propositional) bipolar combinational logic BCL₁ in the bipolar space B₁={−1,0}×{0,1} is upgraded to a first-order (predicate) bipolar logic. BCL₁ is then extended to an (n+1)²-valued crisp bipolar combinational logic BCL_n in the bipolar space B_n={−n,…,−2,−1,0}×{0,1,2,…,n} and a real-valued bipolar fuzzy logic BCL_F in the bipolar space B_F=[−1,0]×[0,1]. A bipolar counterpart of unipolar axioms and rules of inference is introduced with the addition of bipolar augmentation. First-order consistency and completeness are proved. Depolarization functions are identified for the recovery of BCL₁, BCL_n, and BCL_F to Boolean logic, a (n+1)-valued logic, and fuzzy logic, respectively. Thus, BCL₁, BCL_n, and BCL_F are bipolar generalizations or fusions of Boolean logic, multiple valued logic, and fuzzy logic, respectively. The bipolar family of systems provides a unique representation for bipolar knowledge fusion and visualization in an equilibrium world. The semantics of the bipolar systems are established, justified, and compared with unipolar systems. A redress is presented for the ancient paradox of the liar that leads to a few comments on Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

This might seem like arcane Chinese medicine until you get down to the mathematical  inference rules of Ying and Yang Fuzzy Logic.  The medicine my or may not work but the thinking does, I think.

This is more food for thought but more than I can digest at one sitting:

Chapter 2: Either/Or Logic and Beyond
Most people perceive and interpret reality in terms of either/or: someone is either good or bad, friendly or unfriendly, intelligent or stupid, loving or unloving—and the list could be continued indefinitely, not only for qualities of people but also for anything else. Thus, reality is perceived in terms of mutually exclusive opposites. But is reality really like that? Or is this opposition our creation due to our conscious or unconscious use of either/or logic? And what are the consequences of using either/or logic for our relationships, society, the world, and ourselves?

^{In Yin and Yang terms of Fuzzy Logic it looks to me like money is more of a Fuzzy logic problem domain in the broadest sense that there are cumulative degrees of money ranging from M0 to M3.} Nevertheless, we treat these various degrees in terms of debt binary rather than a fuzzy range.  Things come out of that fuzzy range to be settled at the M2 level.  The level where real world goods and services are traded with the medium of exchange rather than valued in terms of the medium of the medium of exchange at abstract financial paper levels beyond M2.

This presents ideas of hard and soft money in terms of Yin and Yang.  Very interesting.. I do not feel so all alone.....

Title: Occupy Economy.  The case for soft money.
 
Money follows, like everything else here on this physical plane, the principles of yin and yang. There is "hard" (yang) money and there is "soft" (yin) money. At this time, the world is dominated by yang money. My purpose with this article is to convince you that we need to find a better balance in matters of exchange and economics.

It presents the idea that Money is a placeholder in the business of exchange.  I like it!

^{This entry is getting long...too long.  The last ling that I included above is something to focus up by itself so I am going to carry it over to a new next entry in this blog.}