Should Russia build an economy on the principles of modern monetary theory?

The number on the monitor

MDT is a more complex set of economic ideas than its critics try to imagine, combining elements of Keynesianism and related areas with the charter theory of money. SDT is in many ways similar to post-Keynesianism and can be considered as one of the offshoots of this broader direction (the main differences are in the table). Central to MDT is the analysis of what money is and what its function is. Money, in the words of one of the founding fathers of the MDT, Warren Mosler, is only a “digit on the monitor”, a balance sheet to which you can add “as many zeros as you need.” Since government spending and business activity (through private lending) are the main drivers of aggregate demand, MMT advocates call for a strong fiscal stimulus to maintain full employment in the labor market and smooth out excessive busts and booms in the business cycle.
In 2019, the theory was vigorously discussed in the United States, not only by economists, but also by politicians and heads of regulators, including the Fed. The theory of the “magic money tree” (Magic Money Tree, which duplicates the abbreviation MMT), as skeptics say about it, was eventually officially convicted, but it was its postulates that were then actively used in the American anti-crisis policy of 2020–2021. Already in the second half of 2022, against the backdrop of monthly record-breaking inflation in the public field, the SDT began to “stoning” again, already allegedly empirically ascertaining its death as a theory explaining the reality.