The Sweet Spot Between Laissez-Faire and Centralized Planning — David Sloan Wilson interviews Tim O’Reilly

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Mike Norman
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This is a must read carefully to the end, even though it is longish. while it is not about MMT specifically, it has implications for the development and application of MMT in designing a socio-economic system capable of seizing emergent opportunities and approaching emergent challenges of fast-changing times owing to technological advances.
Also note that the third way between laissez-fair and central planning does NOT refer to the political "third way" of the corporate Clinton-era Democratic Party establishment. It is based on evolutionary theory applied to systems design and entrepreneuring in the digital age in order to create value for all rather than extract value for some.

Tim O'Reilly has really thought this through and presents an outline based on system design (open) instead of management (closed) as the chief organizing principle. He gives many good examples to illustrate his point.

The thesis of the Third Way is that when it comes to positive social change, all three ingredients of an evolutionary process—the target of selection, variation oriented around the target, and the identification and replication of best practices–must be managed at a systemic scale. This is in contrast to the two dominant models of social change, laissez-faire and centralized planning. Laissez-faire doesn’t work because it simply is not the case that the lower-level pursuit of self-interest robustly benefits the common good. Centralized planning doesn’t work because the world is too complex for a group of experts to formulate and implement a grand plan.