The Architect Who Couldn’t Sing, by NEP essayist J.D. ALT has been awarded an eLIT gold award for 2012. The book, which is also available in paperback, makes the case for directing sovereign spending toward a specific kind of infrastructure Alt calls an “Enabling Structure”. Almost exactly a year ago, he introduced the concept of “Enabling Structures” in his first NEP essay Playing Monopolis Monopoly. In that essay, they were playfully represented as a second level to the Monopoly game board, but they are, in fact, an actual architectural concept Alt has been pursuing for many years.
He discovered and became intrigued with MMT after coming to the realization that “Enabling Structures” could be most effectively implemented as a form of sovereign spending. Making the case that sovereign governments actually can issue and spend the currency necessary to build these structures, then, has become a key component of his architectural argument—an argument he is continuing to develop in a book in-progress: Housing for the Masses—Dwellings for the Soul.
Congratulations Mr. Alt!
One thing you can say about architects is that they tend to be more imaginative than most. In effect this means they are good at creating ideas and what else is money but a tool to enable us to develop our ideas, to instruct others to utilize resources to create the goods and services we need as human societies or to buy goods “pre-instructed” from the marketplace. J. D. Alt has proved to be very imaginative in explaining the the fundamental life supporting concept of MMT that in modern societies both government and non-government sectors have to work interdependently to create the money to put our ideas into practice!
Congratulations! and yes, thinking about it, sovereign spending for housing and enabling infrastructure is the safest way to spend the “sovereigns”
I was inspired by this description of Mr. Alt’s book and ordered one for my son who is an architect in New York. My interests in MMT combine with his work in architecture–a great combination!
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Sounds awesome, but what does he mean by “enabling structures”? Infrastructure, basically?