Diagrams & Dollars: Modern Money Illustrated by J.D. Alt is a brief ebook that introduces the national accounts flow concepts used by Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). The book is written for a general audience, covering what are unfortunately the most non-intuitive parts of Functional Finance. The concepts are actually easily understood if they are taught properly, but are difficult to understand if you have been taught that the central government is just like a household.
Book Description
J.D. Alt is an architect and author, and he produced the diagrams that are the heart of the book. As the book cover shown above indicates, he illustrates the money flows within the economy by drawing an analogy to hydraulic flows.
The ebook is quite short, and the price reflects this. This is one of the advantages of the ebook format; it is unclear whether it makes sense to have a 200-page paperback book to introduce some basic economic concepts. (Such short paperback are unlikely to make it into bookstores; one of the side effects of a low page count is that the name of the book cannot fit upon the book spine. This makes the book almost unsalable if the front cover is not exposed to the reader, while publishers pay a lot of money to get their books displayed with the cover out instead of the spine).
Audience
This book is aimed at non-economists. The concepts are introduced by stepping through a number of diagrams, each adding new features. Since people are not used to thinking about how flows work in an aggregated economy, this has to be done at a relatively slow pace.
Although I am presumably a more advanced reader, my feeling is that the text should be understandable to readers with very little background in the subject. Conversely, people that consider
