Naked Keynesianism

Nothing much changed since I posted on this a couple of years ago. The U.S. net international investment position at the end of the first quarter of 2016 was −$7.5 trillion, which corresponds to about 40% of GDP, higher than two years ago. But no real problem in my view Note that this is the sort of number that economists show when they want to suggest a possible run on the dollar, and the demise of its role as a reserve currency. The last report by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) is...

Teaching Latin American Economic Development. Asked students to match the list of countries below with the graph representing GDP per capita in 2016 (source here). List of countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Congo, India, Mexico, Norway, Saudi Arabia, and the US. The point I always try to make is that Latin American economies are (most of them) middle income countries, all the ones in the sample with higher GDP per capita than China. That's often a surprise for many students,...

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As it is often the case when you've been blogging for a while, there is always a precedent, and one might have written about a particular topic. Noah Smith, which I think has been blogging for a shorter period of time than I've been, now comes up with another take down of heterodox economics (having difficulties of understanding the meaning of the mainstream, it's no wonder he gets heterodoxy wrong; on the definition of the latter go here).He argues that "much of heterodox theory is...

OVERALL AIM: To complete the publication of ALL of Keynes’s remaining unpublished writings of academic significance. Only about ONE THIRD were published in the Royal Economic Society edition. A huge quantity of VALUABLE unpublished material remains, scattered across 60 archives in 6 countries. AIM OF THIS CAMPAIGN: Preparation of the Eton and early Cambridge volumes. CAMPAIGN START: 11 October 2016. TO LOCATE PROJECT: Google ‘JMK Writings Project Indiegogo’. It is also planned, with...

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John Cassidy is one of the best economic journalists around (together with Jeff Madrick probably). And not only because he has written about one of my mentors, Wynne Godley. In his last column he tackles the issue of productivity. And again I should say he is on the right track. He first gives a simple example of technological change from the donkey to the truck delivery system. Almost imperceptibly he tells you that you would change from one to another technology if: "you can find enough...

My favorite is still Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth Back from a summer road trip. Should start to blog more consistently soon. Here a new paper from John King in the last issue of ROKE. From the abstract: Joan Robinson's magnum opus, The Accumulation of Capital, was published 60 years ago, in 1956. I begin this diamond jubilee assessment by explaining the intellectual background to the book, placing Robinson's attempt to ‘generalise the General Theory’ in the context of the...

So, besides the nativist, xenophobic, and racist appeals to the darker side of American society, Trump speech was all about trade, and its effects on the working class. That is clearly the strategy for November, and Hillary is, for obvious reasons, weak on that subject. I don't think Trump even thinks Bernie supporters would vote for him, but his appeal to them last night was for them not to vote for Hillary.Trade matters, even if Trump has no clue why. As, I have explained several times...

Bill McColloch published a new PERI Working Paper, which deals with the same issues, in a very different way, raised in the last chapter of his dissertation. From the abstract: The present paper seeks to locate the Bhaduri-Marglin (B-M) model as an historical outcome of the Left's internal disputes over the prospects for social democracy. In better  contextualizing the B-M model as a historical response to the perceived political economic failings of the social compromises upon which the...