New Perspectives on Political Economy and Its History

New Perspectives on Political Economy and Its History
Author: Maria Cristina Marcuzzo
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2020-05-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3030429253

This Festschrift is published in honour of Annalisa Rosselli, a political economist and historian of economic thought, whose academic activity has promoted unconventional ways of thinking throughout her career. A renowned list of scholars articulate and respond to this vision through a series of essays, leading to an advocacy of pluralism and critical thinking in political economy. The book is split into five parts, opening with a section on new topics for the history of economic thought including new perspectives in gender studies and an illustration of the fecundity of the link with economic history. This is followed by sections that address relevant perspectives on the Classical approach to distribution and accumulation, Ricardo, interpretation of Sraffa and the legacy of Keynes. This book will appeal to students interested in reforming economics, as well as academics and economists interested in political economy and the history of economic thought.

New Perspectives on Keynes

New Perspectives on Keynes
Author: Allin Cottrell
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1995
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780822317050

Interest in John Maynard Keynes has increased significantly over the past decade with the publication of his collected writings, increased access to his unpublished papers, and the resulting explosion of secondary literature. Responding to this renewed attention, this collection brings together economists and historians of economics with scholars from philosophy and other related fields to reconsider Keynes's work and its legacy. Several of these essays look at Keynes not simply as an economist, but more broadly as a philosopher. Special attention is directed to his views on aesthetics and moral philosophy, as well as his contributions as a probability theorist. The development of the Keynesian heritage is also considered: How did Keynesian ideas become assimilated and domesticated into the mainstream of economic thought--to the point of becoming dominant as the orthodoxy of the economics profession? What was the relationship between postwar British conservatives, Keynes's work, and Britain's relative economic decline? The archivist in charge of Keynes's papers provides an additional vantage point on Keynes's working methods and the broad range of scholars interested in his writings. Finally, all of the essays are followed by a responder's comments, thus providing an exchange of viewpoints. Contributors. A. W. Coats, Allin F. Cottrell, Jacqueline Cox, William Darity, John Davis, Robert Dimand, Peter Groenewegen, Kevin Hoover, Henry E. Kyburg Jr., David Laidler, Michael S. Lawlor, Greg Lilly, D. E. Moggridge, R. M. O'Donnell, Kerry Pearce, Jochen Runde, Teddy Seidenfeld, J. D. Tomlinson

Perspectives on Keynesian Economics

Perspectives on Keynesian Economics
Author: Arie Arnon
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2010-11-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3642144098

This book combines historical and policy-oriented perspectives on the relevance of the Keynesian approach for economic theory, policy, and crisis analysis. The first part focuses on historical, theoretical, and methodological issues, and puts them in context with current developments. The second part focuses on the application of the Keynesian approach to modeling the economy, policy-making, and analyzing the ongoing crisis of the early 21st century. Bringing together contributions by leading macroeconomists such as Laidler, Cukierman, Colander and Boyer, and leading historians of economics such as Hollander, Boianovsky, Marcuzzo, Dimand, Witztum, Young, deVroey and Arnon, the book offers a comprehensive overview of Keynesian economics today. One of the book’s most essential features are the commentaries on the papers, which promote a cross-fertilization between macroeconomists and historians of economics, providing, in conjunction with the papers themselves, a balanced outlook on the current relevance of Keynesian economics.

Raising Keynes

Raising Keynes
Author: Stephen A. Marglin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 921
Release: 2020-07-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0674971027

Back to the future: a heterodox economist rewrites Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money to serve as the basis for a macroeconomics for the twenty-first century. John Maynard Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money was the most influential economic idea of the twentieth century. But, argues Stephen Marglin, its radical implications were obscured by Keynes's lack of the mathematical tools necessary to argue convincingly that the problem was the market itself, as distinct from myriad sources of friction around its margins. Marglin fills in the theoretical gaps, revealing the deeper meaning of the General Theory. Drawing on eight decades of discussion and debate since the General Theory was published, as well as on his own research, Marglin substantiates Keynes's intuition that there is no mechanism within a capitalist economy that ensures full employment. Even if deregulating the economy could make it more like the textbook ideal of perfect competition, this would not address the problem that Keynes identified: the potential inadequacy of aggregate demand. Ordinary citizens have paid a steep price for the distortion of Keynes's message. Fiscal policy has been relegated to emergencies like the Great Recession. Monetary policy has focused unduly on inflation. In both cases the underlying rationale is the false premise that in the long run at least the economy is self-regulating so that fiscal policy is unnecessary and inflation beyond a modest 2 percent serves no useful purpose. Fleshing out Keynes's intuition that the problem is not the warts on the body of capitalism but capitalism itself, Raising Keynes provides the foundation for a twenty-first-century macroeconomics that can both respond to crises and guide long-run policy.

Capitalist Revolutionary

Capitalist Revolutionary
Author: Roger E. Backhouse
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2011-11-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0674062841

The Great Recession of 2008 restored John Maynard Keynes to prominence. After decades when the Keynesian revolution seemed to have been forgotten, the great British theorist was suddenly everywhere. The New York Times asked, “What would Keynes have done?” The Financial Times wrote of “the undeniable shift to Keynes.” Le Monde pronounced the economic collapse Keynes’s “revenge.” Two years later, following bank bailouts and Tea Party fundamentalism, Keynesian principles once again seemed misguided or irrelevant to a public focused on ballooning budget deficits. In this readable account, Backhouse and Bateman elaborate the misinformation and caricature that have led to Keynes’s repeated resurrection and interment since his death in 1946. Keynes’s engagement with social and moral philosophy and his membership in the Bloomsbury Group of artists and writers helped to shape his manner of theorizing. Though trained as a mathematician, he designed models based on how specific kinds of people (such as investors and consumers) actually behave—an approach that runs counter to the idealized agents favored by economists at the end of the century. Keynes wanted to create a revolution in the way the world thought about economic problems, but he was more open-minded about capitalism than is commonly believed. He saw capitalism as essential to a society’s well-being but also morally flawed, and he sought a corrective for its main defect: the failure to stabilize investment. Keynes’s nuanced views, the authors suggest, offer an alternative to the polarized rhetoric often evoked by the word “capitalism” in today’s political debates.

Keynes's General Theory for Today

Keynes's General Theory for Today
Author: Jesper Jespersen
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 178100952X

ÔAt a time of renewed interest in Keynes, this volume provides an illuminating and forward-looking collection of papers. They explain the meaning of KeynesÕs great contribution and also show how that contribution can be developed further for application to modern economic policy issues. Most important, the papers explain the ways in which KeynesÕs methodological approach is so different from that which continues to dominate mainstream economics and how productive it would be if that approach were applied to our modern experience.Õ Ð Sheila Dow, University of Stirling, UK ÔThis book celebrates the 75th anniversary of KeynesÕs General Theory, which has proved yet again to be an endless source of inspiration. These authors take The General Theory as a point of departure from which to address the problems of today from fresh perspectives. This volume is indeed Keynes for today Ð and tomorrow.Õ Ð Victoria Chick, University College London, UK ÔKeynesÕs General Theory for Today is a fine set of thoughtful and highly relevant essays. They relate several ideas of Keynes to todayÕs happenings, putting forward modifications and extensions to take into account both short-term and long-term happenings in advanced capitalist economies. Especially useful are the investigations of KeynesÕs revolutionary methods of reasoning in economics, long abandoned by orthodox economists, to the great detriment of our understanding of what is happening and what may be done about it. These essays should be required reading for students, teachers and policy makers alike.Õ Ð G.C. Harcourt, University of New South Wales, Australia The themes of this important new volume were chosen to mark the 75th anniversary of the publication of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. The distinguished authors concentrate on the relevance of this seminal publication for macroeconomic theory, method and the politics of today. This is particularly pertinent as similarities with the 1930s are striking in terms of unemployment, low growth, financial fragility and the European monetary union resembling the gold standard. Illustrating new ways of understanding the importance of uncertainty in macroeconomics, particularly in view of the importance of finance and balance of payments imbalances within a monetary union, this book will prove a stimulating and challenging read for academics, researchers and students of macroeconomics, heterodox economics, and the methodology and history of economic thought.

Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics

Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics
Author: Nicholas Wapshott
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2011-10-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 039308311X

“I defy anybody—Keynesian, Hayekian, or uncommitted—to read [Wapshott’s] work and not learn something new.”—John Cassidy, The New Yorker As the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the world into turmoil, two men emerged with competing claims on how to restore balance to economies gone awry. John Maynard Keynes, the mercurial Cambridge economist, believed that government had a duty to spend when others would not. He met his opposite in a little-known Austrian economics professor, Freidrich Hayek, who considered attempts to intervene both pointless and potentially dangerous. The battle lines thus drawn, Keynesian economics would dominate for decades and coincide with an era of unprecedented prosperity, but conservative economists and political leaders would eventually embrace and execute Hayek's contrary vision. From their first face-to-face encounter to the heated arguments between their ardent disciples, Nicholas Wapshott here unearths the contemporary relevance of Keynes and Hayek, as present-day arguments over the virtues of the free market and government intervention rage with the same ferocity as they did in the 1930s.

New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy

New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy
Author: Robert Fredona
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 438
Release: 2018-03-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 331958247X

This volume offers a snapshot of the resurgent historiography of political economy in the wake of the ongoing global financial crisis, and suggests fruitful new agendas for research on the political-economic nexus as it has developed in the Western world since the end of the Middle Ages. New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy brings together a select group of young and established scholars from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds—history, economics, law, and political science—in an effort to begin a re-conceptualization of the origins and history of political economy through a variety of still largely distinct but complementary historical approaches—legal and intellectual, literary and philosophical, political and economic—and from a variety of related perspectives: debt and state finance, tariffs and tax policy, the encouragement and discouragement of trade, merchant communities and companies, smuggling and illicit trades, mercantile and colonial systems, economic cultures, and the history of economic doctrines more narrowly construed. The first decade of the twenty-first century, bookended by 9/11 and a global financial crisis, witnessed the clamorous and urgent return of both 'the political' and 'the economic' to historiographical debates. It is becoming more important than ever to rethink the historical role of politics (and, indeed, of government) in business, economic production, distribution, and exchange. The artefacts of pre-modern and modern political economy, from the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries, remain monuments of perennial importance for understanding how human beings grappled with and overcame material hardship, organized their political and economic communities, won great wealth and lost it, conquered and were conquered. The present volume, assembling some of the brightest lights in the field, eloquently testifies to the rich and powerful lessons to be had from such a historical understanding of political economy and of power in an economic age.

Imperfect Competition and Sticky Prices

Imperfect Competition and Sticky Prices
Author: N. Gregory Mankiw
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 448
Release: 1991
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780262631334

These two volumes bring together a set of important essays that represent a "new Keynesian" perspective in economics today. This recent work shows how the Keynesian approach to economic fluctuations can be supported by rigorous microeconomic models of economic behavior. The essays are grouped in seven parts that cover costly price adjustment, staggering of wages and prices, imperfect competition, coordination failures, and the markets for labor, credit, and goods. An overall introduction, brief introductions to each of the parts, and a bibliography of additional papers in the field round out this valuable collection.Volume 1 focuses on how friction in price setting at the microeconomic level leads to nominal rigidity at the macroeconomic level, and on the macroeconomic consequences of imperfect competition, including aggregate demand externalities and multipliers. Volume 2 addresses recent research on non-Walrasian features of the labor, credit, and goods markets. Contributors George A Akerlof, Costas Azariadis, Laurence Ball, Ben S. Bernanke, Mark Bits, Olivier J. Blanchard, Alan S. Blinder, John Bryant, Andrew S. Caplin, Dennis W. Carlton, Stephen G. Cecchetti, Russell Cooper, Peter A. Diamond, Gary Fethke, Stanley Fischer, Robert E. Hall, Oliver Hart, Andrew John, Nobuhiro Kiyotaki, Alan B. Krueger, David M. Lilien, Ian M. McDonald, N. David Mankiw, Arthur M. Okun, Andres Policano, David Romer, Julio J. Rotemberg, Garth Saloner, Carl Shapiro, Andrei Shleifer, Robert M. Solow, Daniel F. Spulber, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Lawrence H. Summers, John Taylor, Andrew Weiss, Michael Woodford, Janet L. Yellen

The Economic Consequences of the Peace

The Economic Consequences of the Peace
Author: John Maynard Keynes
Publisher: Simon Publications LLC
Total Pages: 312
Release: 1920
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781931541138

John Maynard Keynes, then a rising young economist, participated in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 as chief representative of the British Treasury and advisor to Prime Minister David Lloyd George. He resigned after desperately trying and failing to reduce the huge demands for reparations being made on Germany. The Economic Consequences of the Peace is Keynes' brilliant and prophetic analysis of the effects that the peace treaty would have both on Germany and, even more fatefully, the world.