Naked Keynesianism

It's been a while since I wrote about the Brazilian crisis (a summary of the previous catastrophic election here). In part that election and the continued crisis explains why I have written less, not just about Brazil. This has been a long economic depression that started in 2015 (see graph), with a coup in 2016 and since 2018 the added problem of a right-wing authoritarian regime that won an election that was only possible with the political proscription of Lula. But at least the political...

By Thomas Palley This Fall (October/November 2022) marks the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Review of Keynesian Economics (ROKE). The founding co-editors were Louis-Philippe Rochon, Matias Vernengo, and I. At the beginning of 2018 Louis-Philippe Rochon stepped down to become sole editor of the Review of Political Economy and he was replaced by Esteban Pérez Caldentey.Since then, ROKE has further enhanced its reputation, becoming a leading heterodox economics journal as measured by...

Here a short video. I do offer a few remarks. I would add that Louis-Philippe was central not just in the initial discussions that we had going back two decades now, to when we were at Kalamazoo College, but in getting Elgar into the journal business. Not sure Elgar would have done that without LP convincing them. This happened at the time that the JPKE was transitioning from Paul Davidson editorship, to the Jan Kregel and Randy Wray period. [embedded content]I suggested Tom to LP, since he...

Ecological economics emerged in the 1970s, as a sub-field of mainstream economics, using some of the conventional tools of neoclassical economics, but trying to move away from it, not only regarding some of the theoretical choices, but also distancing from some of the ethical concerns of the mainstream (Holt and Spash, 2009). Even though there were precursors to ecological economics, in particular the work of Kenneth Boulding, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and Karl William Kapp, it is clear that...

This will be part of the 10 year anniversary of ROKE. Register here.

My paper, in Italian, which was a modified version of a talk last year, has been published in Moneta e Credito, and is available for download here.

[embedded content]The conversation on inflation with Marc Lavoie at the Fields Institute in Toronto. I think that there was an agreement, between us, and most people in the room that the oligopolistic view of inflation does not hold water. I tried to discuss the Argentinean case on the basis of a piece that I co-wrote with Fabián Amico and Franklin Serrano, published in the local version of Le Monde Diplomatique online. A longer version, also in Spanish, here. An English version is in the...

With Lance in Beijing (2001)I took Lance’s macro class in the Fall of 1995 at the New School for Social Research (NSSR), and then was his Teaching Assistant for two years. The book we formally used was Income Distribution, Inflation and Growth: Lectures on Structuralist Macroeconomic Theory, in which the terms (not the concepts) for wage-led and profit-led economies were first used (at least that's what I think; profit-led does not appear in the index, I must note). But classes were based on...

Our reply to a very inaccurate discussion of our views on MMT by Agustin Mario. From the abstract:This paper responds to some inaccuracies on the discussion of our views on Modern Money Theory (MMT), as discussed by Agustin Mario. We believe that while is correct in noting that autonomous spending generates taxes, and fiscal balances are a result, MMT authors overlook the difficulties in pursuing expansionary fiscal policy in the developing countries. These are limited by the existence of an...

A few years back in Colombia, we discussed with a group of students about a possible reading group of Sraffa's Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (PCMC).  After the pandemic I thought that the experience with Zoom perhaps created the conditions for that. But I also have a concern expressed here several times (see here and here) about the lack of understanding of the theory of value and distribution and its importance for policy analysis, and not just among mainstream...