Tag Archives: john maynard keynes

Is investment spending “spending,” or isn’t it? Steve Roth (@ Wealth Economics) J.M. Keynes’ brief Preface to the French edition of General Theory is sometimes held up as the most concise, cogent, and coherent expression of his economic understandings. It achieves that, but in doing so it also reveals a core incoherence in that thinking. An obligatory nod here to the importance of many pieces of Keynes’ thinking, notably the rather...

One of Keynes’s central tenets — in clear contradistinction to the beliefs of mainstream economists — is that there is no strong automatic tendency for economies to move toward full employment levels in monetary economies. Money doesn’t matter in mainstream macroeconomic models. That’s true. But in the real world in which we happen to live, money does certainly matter. Money is not neutral and money matters in both the short run and the long run.... "New Keynesianism" isn't Keynesian. It...

The coronavirus news flow is getting worse, and generating corresponding news flow. I just want to make a couple comments that stick close to my limited expertise. From a markets standpoint, the market that matters is the credit market, and not equities. I am not plugged into the credit market news flow, but I do not see anything that indicates that anything is irreversibly broken. Otherwise, the situation underlines the big difference between randomness and uncertainty. This is a geeky...

In an important new book Keynes Against Capitalism: His Economic Case for Liberal Socialism (Routledge, 2019) James Crotty argues that Keynes was a socialist who advocated a much more radical economic agenda than most mainstream economists and political analysts realize. Based on a very close reading of Keynes’ work, Crotty argues that core Keynesian economic ideas should inform democratic socialism today.... Progressive Economics ForumWhy Keynes was a socialistAndrew Jackson

Excellent summary of the recognition of the classical fallacy by Keynes, what followed, and why neoclassical economics is proving so difficult to dislodge even though it has been discredited. Note: This is not the only fallacy that plays a part in neoclassical assumptions. The fallacy of composition is another, as Keynes also observed.Social Europe'Fridays for Keynesianism' Peter Bofinger | Professor of Economics at Würzburg University and a former member of the German Council of Economic...

Minsky’s journey from socialism to stability for capitalist profitability comes about because he and the post-Keynesians deny and/or ignore Marx’s law of value, just as the ‘market socialists’, Lange and Lerner, did. The post-Keynesians and MMTers deny/ignore that profit comes from surplus value extracted by exploitation in the capitalist production process and it is this that is the driving force for investment and employment. They ignore the origin and role of profit, except as a residual...

More keeper quotes. The idea behind MMT is as old as the hills. But previously, it was only a possible scenario, whereas MMT describes the existing monetary system since 1971 — the "pure creditary system" that Knut Wicksell had envisioned as a thought experiment.  Keynes said it would be useful to educated people in this in order to remove the shibboleths of the past that prevent proper fiscal response now. How prescient he was. Received knowledge is sticky even when it is shown to be...

This is not your typical gold buggy "argument" against MMT although it is pro-gold standard. Jeffrey Snider goes through the history and lays out a case. It is worth a read.  Edison was exactly right about the nature of gold as money. Everything boils down to who gets to control it. If you believe as Edison and Ford the government can be and most often is a force for good, then monetary restraint is a barbarous evil. But what if the government is populated, always, by bumbling...

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...