Socialdem. 21st Century

Academic Agent – a YouTube libertarian and unusually ignorant advocate of Austrian economics – tries to refute Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) in this video:[embedded content]Let us run through this video and refute Academic Agent’s arguments point by point:(1) Academic Agent fails to Refute the Three Core Principles of MMT There are three fundamental principles in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), as follows:(1) Most sovereign governments today are the monopoly issuers of their own fiat currencies...

The libertarian “Academic Agent” examines the concept of excess capacity here:[embedded content]First, Academic Agent is utterly wrong to claim that Austrian theory is only looking at the “price of a good across a whole economy,” and that my analysis of how real-world individual firms behave is somehow irrelevant to Austrian theory.Austrian economics has a “Theory of the Firm,” just like Neoclassical economics, and Austrian theory says the average firm should be engaged in flexible pricing...

This is an older and short video in which Steve Keen is interviewed, and gives a short summary of Keynes’ economic ideas:[embedded content]An important issue is Steve Keen’s point that Neoclassical synthesis Keynesianism was a misguided and distorted development of the General Theory and Keynes’ later articles, even though Keynes did allow this to happen in Chapter 18 of the General Theory, where he played down the role of uncertainty (as had been stressed in Chapter 12). As King notes, if...

I give an account below of Keynes life in 1931.January–May 1931 On 27 January 1931, Friedrich Hayek arrived in London at the London School of Economics (LSE). Hayek gave four evening lectures at 5 p.m. from 27 to 30 January 1931 on “Prices and Production” (Howson 2011: 196), and these lectures were later published in England as the book Prices and Production (September 1931), an exposition of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT). Hayek himself had returned to Austria by 14 February...

I give an account below of Keynes life in 1930, the second year of the Great Depression.January–May 1930 In January 1930, the second Hague Conference adopted the Young Plan on German reparations, and, as we saw in the last post, Keynes had corresponded with the leading members on the issue of German reparations. By early 1930, Keynes was beginning to think that an international slump was a possibility (Moggridge 1992: 483).On 19 January 1930, Keynes’ friend Frank Plumpton Ramsey died after...

I give an account below of Keynes life in 1929, the year in which the Great Depression began.January–May 1929 Keynes taught at Cambridge in the first half of the year. The teaching periods at Cambridge were divided into three terms:October–December – Michaelmas January–March – Lent or January term April–June – Easter term.On 18 January 1929, Ludwig Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge, and Keynes met him when he arrived, and allowed Wittgenstein to share his rooms at Cambridge until February...

Victoria Chick gives a talk here on some aspects of the history of Post-Keynesian economics. This talk appears to have been given in 2018:[embedded content]

It is well known that the Great Depression hit Weimar Republic Germany particularly hard. There was severe unemployment, and the wage and price deflation was also severe, as can be seen in these graphs (with data from Mitchell 1992): Moreover, the wage and price deflation did not bring about a rapid or effective recovery. Austerity policies clearly failed in the Weimar Republic, and a number of German businessmen, bureaucrats, journalists, and unorthodox economists were driven to advocate...

Tucker Carlson channels left-wing economics in this debate with the free market, Neoconservative charlatan Ben Shapiro: [embedded content]You have to admire Tucker Carlson for this, despite the gushing praise for the ill-defined concept of “capitalism.” Shapiro, in response, mouths utterly dumb, empty, meaningless drivel.Tucker Carlson is easily the best thing to ever happen to the brain-dead Conservative media in America, probably in living memory. Tucker has morphed from a pointless...

From 1933 to 11 March 1938, Austria was ruled by the clerical fascist Fatherland Front in a regime called the Austrian Federal State.The two dictators of Austria in this period were as follows:Dictators of the Austrian Federal State 5 March 1933–25 July 1934 – Engelbert Dollfuss 29 July 1934–11 March 1938 – Kurt SchuschniggAlthough the Fatherland Front had some anti-capitalist elements, the fact is that in power Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg pursued spending cuts, austerity, budget...