A condition produced by the +M form’s demand mechanism, not a description of a person’s capacity or willingness to contribute. In the MMT technical definition, unemployment is the population of people who must acquire the state’s currency to discharge tax obligations but who cannot find a buyer for their labor denominated in that currency. The state’s spending creates the currency; the state’s taxation creates the need to earn it; the gap between the two creates unemployment.
The +M reading
Within +M grammar, unemployment is a failure state. The person is outside the coordination system. They have no economic standing. Policy responses within the +M grammar aim to move the person back inside: job creation programs, skills training, wage subsidies, employer incentives, and (in the MMT tradition) a Job Guarantee that offers public employment at a fixed wage to anyone willing to work.
All of these responses share an assumption: the solution to exclusion from the +M form is inclusion in the +M form. The person must find employment, earn wages, pay taxes, and participate as a consumer. There is no second coordination system to join. There is only the one, and the person is outside it.
Warren Mosler and Randall Wray are precise about the mechanism. The state does not discover unemployment in the population the way an epidemiologist discovers a disease. The state creates unemployment by imposing a tax obligation and then spending less currency into circulation than the obligation demands. Unemployment is an artifact of the monetary architecture, not a naturally occurring condition. This insight is correct and important. But it operates entirely within the +M grammar. The solution it proposes (spend more, or guarantee employment) still assumes that the only legitimate form of economic participation is wage labor denominated in the state’s unit of account.
The +E reading
The +E form reads the same population differently. The person the +M form calls unemployed is not without capacity, local knowledge, time, or willingness to contribute to the health of the place they live in. They may clear invasive vegetation, monitor water points, grow food, maintain paths, care for children or elderly neighbors, preserve cultural knowledge, or restore degraded land. The +M form cannot see this activity because it produces no price signal and generates no tax revenue. Within +M grammar, the activity does not exist as economic coordination. The person remains unemployed.
The +E form calls this an unrecognized contribution. The capacity is real. The work is real. What is missing is a coordination substrate that makes the work legible, compensates it, and connects it to the wider economy. The bioregional currency, operating through the demand mechanism described in Obligation and Invitation, provides that substrate. The person who earns bioregional currency by doing stewardship work has full economic standing in the +E grammar. They have not found a job. They have gained standing in a second coordination system whose entry requirements match what they already have.
The two readings together
The two readings are not in conflict. They describe the same population from within different coordination grammars. The +M reading is accurate: the person cannot discharge their tax obligation and cannot find wage employment. The +E reading is also accurate: the person has capacity the +M form cannot recognize.
A society that offers only the +M reading has one response to exclusion: get the person back into wage employment. A society that holds both readings has two responses: wage employment for those who can access it, and bioregional participation for those who cannot (or who choose the +E pathway for other reasons). The Obligation and Invitation concept develops the structural argument for why both responses are needed and why neither can substitute for the other.
Related terms
- Unrecognized Contribution
- Modern Monetary Theory
- Taxation
- Coordination Grammar
- M form (Market)
- E form (Emergent)
- Substrate Hypothesis
Related pages
Sources
- Mosler, W. (1993). Soft Currency Economics.
- Wray, L.R. (1998). Understanding Modern Money.
- Wray, L.R. (2015). Modern Money Theory: A Primer, 2nd ed.
- Kelton, S. (2020). The Deficit Myth.
Provenance
Written 12 September 2026. The entry reframes unemployment as a +M-grammar-specific diagnosis and pairs it with its +E-grammar counterpart, unrecognized contribution.