Today, our new comic series – The Smith Family and Their Money Adventure – start. There will be a few episodes each week designed to introduce people to the principles of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) in an easy-to-understand way, while also having some fun. Season 1 starts today…
The Smith family is a middle-class family living in a city in the world. Second generation parents are college educated and have professional careers. Their two children attend local public schools.
Follow them each week through Season 1 as they go about their daily lives and face the realities of human fragility and the limits of their knowledge.
I have been developing this series over the past 12 months with a Japanese friend and manga artist.
We started discussing this issue when I was working in Kyoto in 2022.
Over the next few months, other commitments allowed, we began working on the idea in terms of overall narrative, scripting, and plotting.
Our goal was to create a cartoon that is entertaining but at the same time provides a good educational foundation for learning MMT and understanding why mainstream macroeconomic thinking is an unsound basis for designing and implementing policy.
We’ve created a lot of characters that you’ll get to know – but of course, none of them are based on anyone we know (-:.
We designed a large number of daily situations that these characters find themselves in, where they deal with the macroeconomic and life complexities.
We tried hard not to make it a “looks stupid, MMT is right” type of exercise.
This is our main challenge as an experiment in different ways of delivering educational material and we will see how it turns out.
We also created the series in English and Japanese to bring the work to a wider audience than we would normally get in just one language.
You can access different languages via the navigation bar at the top of the login page.
We also borrowed from standard film industry disclaimers (source):
The story and all names, characters and events described in this work are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or dead), places, buildings and products is intended or should be inferred.
(-:like!
If you identify yourself with any of these roles, then either continue to spread your MMT knowledge or get our textbook and get up to speed, depending on which role you might identify with.
Any feedback you have other than “this sucks” would be greatly appreciated.
MMTed is producing a range of educational materials to help people understand MMT insights.
We have very little funding, and I cross-subsidize it with research funds I have accumulated through: Center for Full Employment and Equity.
If you have any spare money please let me know!
I would like to thank my friend Mihana for her excellent painting skills and helping me get this project up and running.
Now it’s up to you…
That’s enough for today!
(c) Copyright 2023 William Mitchell. all rights reserved.
