Post-Keynesian

Economists say the darnedest things sometimes. They often say things that are factually inaccurate. Noah Smith put his foot in it recently when he claimed in a Bloomberg article: It seems like the only people who don’t instinctively believe in credit-fueled growth are academic economists. Now, this seems odd to me. In the article he notes that Post-Keynesians and Austrians do in fact think that credit fuels economic growth. Given that many of these economists hold academic positions...

In this post I will explore Keynes’ theory of the business cycle. He discusses his views in Chapter 22 of the General Theory and I think they hold up pretty well today. At the beginning of the chapter he notes that the business cycle — so-called, because it is not really a “cycle” at all despite what Keynes says in the chapter — is a highly complex phenomenon and that we can only really glean some very general features of it. Keynes opens with a very clear quote on what he thinks to...

At the moment I am doing some research for a project that I might be working on soon. The project will be to provide a useable introduction to Post-Keynesian theory for those working in financial markets. Actually, I hope to write a book on this in the future, so this project is something that I have been interested in for a long time. The more I studied Keynes’ own work and the work of some of his better interpreters the more I came to the same conclusion: Keynes was first and...

I have some writing to do today, so I’m not doing a post. Yesterday, however, I published a piece on Al Jazeera America about the future of Scotland after the election. It might be worth a read. Scotland’s future is still in doubt If you are interested in this issue — and I think that it is an extremely interesting issue as Scotland still has the potential to be a country ripe for economic experiment — I highly recommend the following piece by Frances Coppola. In it she plugs my dual...