Jeremy Corbyn pledged over the weekend that, if he was to become Prime Minister, he would deliver free high-speed full-fibre broadband to everyone by 2030. To do it he would renationalise Open Reach, the network arm of BT. Is any of this a good idea? Phil Dobbie asks Steve Keen whether the government can deliver a solution any faster than the private sector. Surely subsidies are a better approach. And can’t something be learnt from the experience in Australia, where politicking has destroyed the country’s hope of having decent broadband anytime soon. Instead, they have something that’s slower and more expensive than what Britain already has. Even if the government was to manage the roll-out – does it really need to be free? And, if we pursued the principle of Modern Monetary Theory, isn’t there a danger that we’d see more schemes like this, without the fiscal rigour that you’d expect when access to funding is more restrictive?

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For all the best efforts we have seen over recent years, the gender pay gap in most countries remains an issue. There are lots of other factors determining how much you get paid, of course – your age, your education, where you live. Can these gaps ever be resolved? Probably not, says Steve Keen, who says the issue is one of hierarchy. Society needs hierarchy to organise itself, so we will always see some getting paid more than others, even if, on the face of it, they don’t deserve it. The question is, how do people rise to the top of the hierarchy and what is the pay differential between the top and the bottom.

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Steve Keen and Phil Dobbie had very different ideas about Brexit a few years ago. Now they both agree it’s a vote that should never have happened? So, is it the impact of tariffs?? Is it the impact on foreign investment? Is it impacts on the supply chain? No, many of those things, Steve believes, will be overcome. It’s the one unsurmountable thing that was never discussed ahead of the vote – the one thing that is likely to kill the whole idea. Now they agree on one thing, Brexit will never happen.

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One of the constraints of MMT is that to create more government money you need to have a sovereign currency. That rules out countries in the Eurozone and developing nations heavily reliant on the US dollar. Yet the idea of a Green New Deal is to resolve the issue of climate change using MMT. How can you pursue a global issue with a protocol that only applies in certain parts of the world? And how do you apply it without going down the dangerous road of world government? Questions Phil Dobbie puts to Prof Steve Keen in this week’s Debunking Economics podcast.

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Larry Randall Wray has suggested Modern Monetary Theory should be applied to create a Green New Deal. This week and next, Phil Dobbie talks to Prof Steve Keen about the idea of creating government money to tackle the climate emergency. Would it work? Is there a danger that public sector spending will crowd out private investment in innovative approaches to renewable energy? And what can we learn from the original New Deal, from Roosevelt just after the Great Depression?

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