- Zach Carter's The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, amd the Life of John Maynard Keynes.
- James Crotty's Keynes Against Capitalism: His Economic Case for Liberal Socialism.
- Stephanie Kelton's The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy.
- Stephen Marglin's to-be-published Raising Keynes: A Twenty-First-Century General Theory. I think his earlier Growth, Distribution, and Prices parallels Donald Harris' even earlier Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution in that they both see Sraffa's price equations, supplemented by dual quantity relations, as a whole model that can be closed by alternative theories. Marglin draws some contrasts in his notes on the literature.
- Bill Mitchell, Randy Wray, and Martin Watts' Macroeconomics.
- Matthew Yglesias's One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. (His twitter feed is relentlessly promoting this.)
Posts
12 years ago
7 comments:
«Stephanie Kelton's The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy.»
I have given this a skim and it seems rather unoriginal and uninteresting.
«James Crotty's Keynes Against Capitalism: His Economic Case for Liberal Socialism.»
The title seems far-fetched, JM Keynes was a traditional Liberal, even if not a victorian style "laissez-faire" one. No socialism in his work I think.
On this blog post: https://www.concertedaction.com/2020/08/16/nicholas-kaldor-on-the-importance-of-history/ I saw a quote from Kaldor that may be of interest to you and motivate looking for more Kaldor works:
«owing to the importance of increasing returns in manufacturing, the development of an industrial system is largely self-generated, where, owing to a powerful feed-back mechanism, ‘events of the recent past can only be explained in terms of the actual sequence through which the system has progressed; history enters into the causation of events in an essential way’.»
This related also to a comment I made previously:
«JB Clark's three parables are reported in that “Whatever happened” paper, and here I quote them in all their ridiculousness:
“With the usual assumptions, like exogenously given resources and technology, constant returns to scale, diminishing marginal productivity and competitive equilibrium”»
That “increasing returns” imply path-dependency is something that never occurred to me before, But I was well aware that “constant returns” is one of those “ridiculous or inconsistent assumptions (documented mostly by Steve Keen in "Debunking Economics") whose purpose is essentially to ensure that such terrible things do not happen. The initial formulation was even designed to ensure that the optimization landscape was purely convex, that is a dome with a single and obvious maximum”, as I also wrote in a previous comment. But obviously I am still making no sense to a mainstream Economist and neither does Kaldor :-).
I wonder whether there is some link between increasing returns and "Wicksell effects"/"re-switching". I am very sleepy so memory impaired, but IIRC they are usually attributed to the effect of interest rates, them being the link between past and future, altering the optimal amount of capital intensity. But that's not quite the right wording.
«I have given this a skim and it seems rather unoriginal and uninteresting.»
If you haven't read them yet I would recommend instead M Pettis "The volatility machine" and the classic essay by H Minsky "Stabilizing an Unstable Economy" https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/hm_archive/144/ (or the overview book by LR Wray "Why Minsky matters").
Those are millions of light years away from neoclassical Economics and JB Clark and other pernicious dissembling. I have mentioned before also the work of M Gaffney, a marginalist but not a neoclassicist, and his writing made me understand the role of JB Clark and his pernicious dissembling. He died quite recently, at the end of July, and his NYT obituary reports:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/26/business/economy/mason-gaffney-dead.html
«He started teaching at the University of California, Riverside, in 1976. He once said in an interview that as he was about to turn 65 he was pressured to retire. He refused, he said, and was told he had to teach Econ 101. “I was delighted,” he said. “I got a chance to indoctrinate students about economic theories so they weren’t stunted by the standard neoclassical texts.”»
Marglin
«Marglin»
Very good point, and he is another one who teaches not-neoclassical introductory political economy courses. But I am sad that I haven't read any work yet by him, only debates about his works, Will find the time soon. Same for Bowles, mentioned earlier by another or same Anonymous. But I tend to prefer old masters :-).
I think Keynes was engaged in a project of rethinking liberalism. Popular books agitating more or less towards a worthwhile goal should be read for what they are. They do not need to be original academic treatises. I have Minsky's John Maynard Keynes as an ebook, but I have not reread it since seeing it in an university library decades ago. I'll probably read the Marglin when it comes out. Apparently he has not had any scholarly interaction with his colleages in his department in decades; they just ignore him. He said something like that in a video on youtube for some years.
By what Marglin explains in https://www.elgaronline.com/view/journals/roke/5-3/roke.2017.03.04.xml he seems really close to your points on wages and employment. From section 4.4 and 4.5 one reads:
One unexpected result is the variability of the response to an exogenous price shock. The anticipated stagflationary result, in which inflation and employment move in opposite directions, is one possibility, but it is also possible for inflation and employment to move in the same direction. Even more surprising is the possibility that, by stimulating capital deepening, a higher energy price can lead to higher employment along with lower inflation.
Finally, results with respect to the conventional wage both confirm and go beyond received doctrine on the left. When investment demand is fixed and saving depends on profits (the implicit assumption that underlies the argument for higher wages) a higher conventional wage will lead to greater aggregate demand and higher employment via the impact on consumption demand: higher wages mean lower profits and less saving, so it takes more output and employment to generate the saving corresponding to the given level of investment demand. But once the assumption of a fixed investment demand is dropped, the results Bhaduri and I highlighted become possible. If capital widening dominates, then lower profitability leads to lower investment demand and a lower level of employment. By contrast, the profitability of capital deepening is enhanced by higher wages, and this provides a complementary avenue to the consumption-based case for associating higher employment with higher wages.
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