Prof Keen's explanation of the interplay between use value and exchange value was really well put! It makes a lot more sense when put into that dialectical perspective.
Michael Hudson's analysis of humanity's civil societies fitted over the ages, set by Nature to Calendar Ecological Cycles and MMT Provisioning strategies, these circumstances are so far only barely recognized by the Quants who have the appropriate aptitude to make sense of the political b-s in appropriate terms relevant to Actuality.
@profstevekeen i think a crash course for economist on thermodynamics is necessary to understand the basics of the laws. Essentially, value is a specific type of energy that can be used to do work (in the physics sense) + waste . Most of human history was food+water+consumable_minerals that allowed humans to move. (labor is the engine using the energy not the source of the energy/value), nowadays we are able to use photons, electrons, and hydrocarbons to do work (machines). Humanity cannot create value it can only use existing energy, transform it, and distribute it at a loss at each step. Once you have the food/energy flowing, you can then have subjective valuations of exchange goods as a by-product of the surplus generated from energy harvest. If you lose the core energy the subjective values of non-energy goods quickly goes to 0.
You say "labor is the engine using the energy not the source of the energy/value" Yes labor is the human input and it encompasses mental labor which enables development of new methods to improve efficiencies in creating goods and services to meet human needs. All of this comes at an opportunity cost in which allocation of respective costs and benefits are necessary. The problem with MMT is that there is little or no recognition of the opportunity cost that is required in every decision that is made to pursue one alternative over another. e.g. it is not wise to pursue a path where efficiencies and effectiveness is already low in comparison to an option which is already proven to be superior or more cost effective. It is an MMt fatal flaw in their idea of bringing back into service the idle capacity of industry since they don't consider opportunity costs in their theory.
The discussion about 1:00:00 into this, talking about how industries typically have a few dominant players and lots of hungry competitors - may I recommend bringing in the work of Clayton Christensen?
If you took the POV that an individual decision-making process based on survival in the natural probabilistic environment has a daily routine of finding something to eat there and then, and looking at the environment as a calendar of seasons in the natural order of QM-TIME holographic pulse-evolution, a revised sense of values is a continuous standing wave-packaging phenomenon, ie nothing other than thermodynamical real-time data stays constant, and relative-timing ratio-rates perfect gas math-motion log-antilog interference positioning-location Perspective Principle is knowable. Evaluate WYSIWYG.
