Naked Keynesianism

Paul (I'm next to him) and the Brazilians at the UMKC, PK Conference in 2002Paul has passed away a few days ago. He wasn't in good shape for a while, and this was expected. He lived a long and productive life. I wasn't personally close to him, even though I met him several times from the mid-1990s onward. He went to two conferences I co-organized at the Federal University in Rio, always with Louise, which was a central figure of Post Keynesian (PK) life, and basically run the Journal of Post...

[embedded content] Our panel at the UNICAMP conference last Thursday, with Mark Schwartz, and Andrés Arauz.

Almost everything that’s wrong with conventional views on fiscal policy is on display in this column (well written and clear) by one of the key journalists from Folha de São Paulo, Vinicius Torres Freire. He suggests that the current fiscal adjustment is not credible. For him, this is a confidence crisis, caused by Lula’s insistence on attacking the central bank policy and his lukewarm support for the adjustment. Why the adjustment is necessary, he never asks. It’s evident, for any educated...

The media and a good chunk of the policy wonks are surprised that Biden does not get the deserved recognition for the relatively good state of the US economy, and that as a result he is suffering in the polls. There are two separate, but interrelated, causes for that. The most obvious can be defined in one word, inflation. The second, is related to the fact that, even though the recovery from the pandemic was fast, the economic situation for most working class people has not been great for a...

(1930-2024)Maria da Conceição Tavares passed away last Sunday. She was among the key thinkers of the Latin American Structuralist School, often associated with the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). In her case, Anibal Pinto, who was her teacher in a ECLA course in the early 1960s, and Celso Furtado, who was never formally her teacher, were her major influences. She was instrumental in introducing Kalecki in Brazilian academic circles, and in her debate with Furtado on the...

(1924-2023)Robert Solow, who was a member of the editorial board of the Review of Keynesian Economics (ROKE), died in December 2023. Solow holds a special place in the history of macroeconomics, and he was a strong supporter of the ROKE project. In this brief note I want to honor Solow’s contribution to economics and to place on record his contribution to ROKE.Histories of macroeconomics tend to emphasize the disputes between Keynesians and Monetarists, at least up to the 1970s. Those...

[embedded content] My talk at the IDEAS/PERI conference a few weeks ago. As I said there, I hate to be the optimist in the room, but I'm a bit more skeptical about the risks of a generalized sovereign debt crisis in the Global South. The two papers I cite are these (in their PERI Working Paper versions) two (one and two).

[embedded content] Esteban Pérez's talk at the University of Chile, about Raúl Prebisch, about whom we have written several papers. This is in Spanish.

Tom Palley reply to response about his paper on Keynes lack of understanding of class conflict. In many ways, this is how Tom discusses Keynes lack of understanding of old classical political economy. Tom is correct in pointing out that:"Kalecki (1933 [1971]) began the process of incorporating conflict into the Keynesian paradigm, but there is much more to be done regarding recognizing conflicts’ implications for economic theory and recognizing the multiple fora in which it appears."Of...

[embedded content] A seminar organized by the Association for Heterodox Economics with myself, Ramiro Álvarez and the Argentine Senator Carolina Moisés.