About Progressive Money

Politically engaged Australians, and progressive activists in particular, who have never studied economics and have been told that's why they can't have an opinion on the budget. You can. The mechanics of money are not hard. They have just rarely been explained plainly, and some of the most common claims about them turn out to be wrong, or at least much more contested than they sound.

By the end of the course you should have had a fair go at learning to:

• explain how money is created, by banks and by a currency-issuing government
• describe what government spending, taxes, deficits and debt actually do, and what limits them
• explain the RBA's case for using interest rates against inflation, and the main criticisms of it
• state MMT's core propositions accurately, including their assumptions and limits
• state mainstream arguments well enough that a mainstream economist would accept your summary
• tell an accounting identity from a theory, a theory from evidence, and evidence from a value judgement
• take an unfamiliar economic claim from a politician or commentator and test it

Nearly every political argument in Australia, from Medicare to housing to climate, eventually turns into an argument about money: can we afford it, who pays, what happens to prices and jobs. People who don't understand how money works can be told almost anything. People who do can ask better questions, of the government, of the opposition, and of their own side.

This site is openly interested in Modern Monetary Theory and post-Keynesian economics. These traditions put the mechanics of a currency-issuing government at the centre, describe bank money creation in a way central banks now share, and ask questions about full employment and real resources that are useful for progressive policy.

Being interested in a school of thought is not the same as treating it as settled. MMT is contested, and some of its claims are stronger than its evidence. So the course teaches it carefully, alongside its critics.

You can't evaluate an argument until you can state the other side's case in terms they'd accept. So the course teaches mainstream economics properly before critiquing it, often in the words of the Reserve Bank, Treasury and the Bank of England, and has a whole pathway on how mainstream economists think and where MMT disagrees. The aim is people who can think critically about economic claims, including MMT's.

We don't make videos. We look for publicly available videos that explain one important idea clearly, from economists, researchers, central banks, Treasury, journalists and experienced economic educators. We prefer official and authors' own channels, check every video is still available and embeddable, and record its real length so you know the commitment. Long lectures are marked as optional. Where a video overstates its case or gets something wrong, the lesson says so.

Lesson text, quizzes and worked examples are our own writing, based on publicly available sources. We don't reproduce transcripts.

Every claim on the site is one of a few kinds: an accounting identity, an institutional fact, an empirical finding, a theory, a contested explanation, a policy proposal, or a value judgement. We try to make clear which is which. Identities are never presented as disputed, and contested explanations are never presented as fact.

Where economists disagree, a box marked Where this is contested sets out what is established, what each side argues, where the real disagreement is, and what evidence would help settle it. Not every question has two equally supported sides; where the evidence leans one way, we say so.

Factual claims are linked to public sources: the Reserve Bank, Treasury, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Australian Office of Financial Management, the Parliamentary Budget Office, the Bank of England, freely available research and the economists' own published work. No institution is treated as automatically right. Every link was checked when it was added, and video links are re-checked automatically every week.

• It is not investment or financial advice. Nothing here tells you what to do with your own money.
• It is an introduction, not a degree. It covers money, banking, government finance, inflation, employment, tax, trade and housing, and leaves out a great deal.
• Finishing it doesn't make anyone an expert. The questions and assessments help you see what you understand; they don't certify it.
• Figures from budgets and statistics date quickly. Each is dated where it appears.
• It has a point of view, and it says so.

There are no accounts, no tracking and no ads. If you mark lessons complete or take the self-checks, that information is stored only in your own browser, on your own device. Nothing you type is sent anywhere. You can clear it at any time from the course page. Videos are embedded from YouTube's privacy-enhanced domain and load only when you press play.

All videos are embedded from YouTube and remain the property of their creators and channels. If you find a link that's dead or wrong, we'd like to know.

An independent, non-commercial project made in Newcastle, NSW.