The New Keynesian framework has emerged as the workhorse for the analysis of monetary policy and its implications for inflation, economic fluctuations, and welfare. It is the backbone of the new generation of medium-scale models under development at major central banks and international policy institutions, and provides the theoretical underpinnings of the inflation stability-oriented strategies adopted by most central banks throughout the industrialized world. This graduate-level textbook provides an introduction to the New Keynesian framework and its applications to (...) monetary policy. Using a canonical version of the New Keynesian model as a reference framework, Jordi Galí explores issues pertaining to the design of monetary policy, including the determination of the optimal monetary policy and the desirability of simple policy rules. He analyzes several extensions of the baseline model, allowing for cost-push shocks, nominal wage rigidities, and open economy factors. In each case, the implications for monetary policy are addressed, with a special emphasis on the desirability of inflation targeting policies.The most up-to-date and accessible introduction to the New Keynesian framework available Uses a single benchmark model throughout Concise and easy to use Includes exercises An ideal resource for graduate students, researchers, and market analysts. (shrink)

The multiplier is a central concept in Keynesian and post-Keynesian economics. It is largely what justifies activist full-employment fiscal policy: an increase in fiscal expenditures contributing to multiple rounds of spending, thereby financing itself. Yet, while a copingstone of post-Keynesian theory, it is not universally accepted by all post-Keynesians, for reasons vastly different than the mainstream. This book explores both the pros and cons of the multiplier from a strictly post-Keynesian – and Kaleckian – approach. Anchored (...) within the tradition of endogenous money, this book offers a lively discussion from a number of well-known post-Keynesians from a variety of perspectives: history of thought, theory and economic policy. The book starts by analysing the historical foundations of the Keynesian Multiplier and it’s treatment throughout the history of economic thought. Moving through a critical debate about the limits of the multiplier, the contributions finish by offering cutting edge new views on this fascinating concept. (shrink)

In these two volumes, a group of distinguished economists debate the way in which evidence, in particular econometric evidence, can and should be used to relate macroeconomic theories to the real world. Topics covered include the business cycle, monetary policy, economic growth, the impact of new econometric techniques, the IS-LM model, the labour market, new Keynesian macroeconomics, and the use of macroeconomics in official documents.

In these two volumes, a group of distinguished economists debate the way in which evidence, in particular econometric evidence, can and should be used to relate macroeconomic theories to the real world. Topics covered include the business cycle, monetary policy, economic growth, the impact of new econometric techniques, the IS-LM model, the labour market, new Keynesian macroeconomics, and the use of macroeconomics in official documents.

During the 1970s, monetarism and the new classical macroeconomics ushered in an era of neoliberal economic policymaking. Keynesian economics was pushed aside. It was almost forgotten that when Keynesian thinking had dominated economic policymaking in the middle decades of the twentieth century, it had coincided with postwar economic reconstruction in both Europe and Japan, and the unprecedented prosperity and stable growth of the 1950s and 1960s. The global financial crisis of 2007-2009 and the recession that followed changed all (...) that. Influential voices in both academic economics and amongst policy-makers and commentators began to remind us how useful Keynesian ways of thinking could be, especially in coming to terms with our current economic predicaments. When politicians across the globe were confronted with economic crisis, they introduced pragmatic and workable measures that bore all the hallmarks of Keynesianism. This book is about the fall and rise of Keynesian economics.Eatwell and Milgate range widely across the landscape that defines their subject matter. They consider how powerful Keynesian ideas can be when applied to past and present economic problems. They show how helpful these ideas are in explaining why we came to find ourselves in the disorder we are in. They examine where and how the analytical and methodological foundations of conventional macroeconomic wisdom went wrong. They set out a blueprint for an alternative that provides a clearer, more consistent, and more applicable approach to understanding how markets work. They also highlight the interpretive shortcomings that have come to characterize Keynes scholarship itself. They do all of this within the context of a provocative reconsideration of some of the most pressing economic problems that confront financial markets and the global economy today. They conclude that Keynesian ideas are not just for crises, but for constructive economic policy making at all times. (shrink)

Jesper Jespersen’s Macroeconomic methodology: a post Keynesian perspective. Cheltenham : Edward Elgar, 2009, 272 pp. Luigi Pasinetti’s Keynes and the Cambridge Keynesians: a revolution to be accomplished. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009 [2007], 412 pp.

Why does trust collapse in times of crisis? And when, instead, does it become a driver of growth, generating value? This book offers an analysis of the dynamics of trust through a sociological interpretation of the thought of John Maynard Keynes, the first economist to understand the full extent of the confidence-lever. In the context of the 2007 crisis and following recession, the innovative concept of Economy of Trust explains how trust spontaneously replaces the weakened institutional system of quality assurance (...) and control and generates value. Indeed, the deficiency of such a system has become the ideal breeding ground for the growth of the Nominal Economy: the economy that distorts the perception of reality as it widens economic and social disparities, unbalances relationships between risk and wealth in the global society and dissolves the bonds of responsibility. In this way, trust is channeled towards strong "new powers", such as hedge funds companies, rating agencies and investment banks. Within this context, only targeted policies of Economy of Trust can funnel the 'store of value' effect generated by trust towards positive intents of building social capital. (shrink)

Parallel to the New Left, whose influence on French public opinion is so pronounced today, a new academic movement has grown up in the United States in the last fifteen years. Its ideas are the portents of an intellectual and scientific revolution whose importance for the economic and political future of western society should be almost as great as the Keynesian revolution of the ‘30s.

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. (shrink)

This second volume contains essays which relate to developments in Keynes' scholarship and theorizing in the years since his death and demonstrates the ongoing validity of the Keynesian tradition.

This second volume contains essays which relate to developments in Keynes' scholarship and theorizing in the years since his death and demonstrates the ongoing validity of the Keynesian tradition.

This paper addresses the now entrenched historiography of the Australian Settlement and New Zealand variations thereof. Against the central premise of this historiography, that a particular regime of domestic insulation and external orientation to the British market constrained development and persisted unchanged until the neo-liberal restructuring of the 1980s, it is argued here that the political economy of the beginning of the 20th century was profoundly destabilized by the Depression. As a result, a new, Keynesian regime was established in (...) New Zealand from the late 1930s and in Australia a few years later. The entrenchment of this regime depended upon adoption by remade conservative parties by the end of the 1940s. (shrink)

Personnel Decision Making of Chosen Czech Banking Subjects During the Economic Recession The article focuses on personnel decision making of important banking subjects during the ongoing economic recession with the specialization on financial crisis in 2008. Main objective of the article is to verify the implicit contract theory and to answer the question of how the selected banks solve problem of reducing labour costs during the crisis. Four important banks in years 2005 - 2010 are examined. To identify the economic (...) crisis, is used model, which is based on the model, indicating the U. S. business cycle, which uses analytical team in Raiffeisenbank. Model used in this article is based on three variables. Employment rate is separate variable. The values of business sales are adjusted to the values of basis indices, for which the year 2005 is the basis. The development of all those three variables is similar and it is possible to determine the period from the graphical representation, in which all variables reached their maximum and reversed their trend. To support this, a trend line was added to the graphs. The trend line was determined as a moving average for the four seasons. Based on the model, the beginning of the economic recession was indentified to the turn of 2007 and 2008. The biggest slumps can be seen during the year 2009. The investigated periods are therefore the years 2008 and 2009.The calculations of other variables, describing the current condition of the studied subject, are adjusted to the values of basis indices in the same way as the business sales. The year 2005 is set as a basis. Data from chosen banks' annual reports were used to study their current condition. The basic monitored data are: labour costs, number of employees and earnings after tax. This article focuses attention on the personal decisions of banks, especially on the monitoring of costs of employees and their evolution over time in the context of economic recession. The essential conclusion is the confirmation of the implicit contract theory of the new Keynesian economics, which appeared at all observed subject. It is possible to see a year delay between the reduction of the employees and reduction of salary costs. This delay causes further costs. The reduction was observed in all subjects. (shrink)

Business cycle theory is a broad and disparate field. Different schools of thought offer alternative explanations for cycles, often using different mathematical methods. This book provides academics and graduate students of economics with a compact and accessible exposition of business cycle theory since Keynes. The author places the main theories -- Keynesian economics, monetarism, new classical economics, the real business cycles theory, and new Keynesian economics -- in an historical context by presenting them in the chronological order of (...) their appearance and highlighting their differences and commonalities. He minimizes the necessary mathematical prerequisites by using a unifying mathematical approach: stochastic second-order difference equations, which is explained in detail. Throughout the book, the international dimension of business cycles is acknowledged. The theoretical results obtained are set alongside empirical facts in separate boxes. Each chapter finishes with a set of problems designed to deepen the reader's understanding of the theories presented, and further reading sections which provide access to related material. (shrink)

Macroeconomics is evolving in an almost dialectic fashion. The latest evolution is the development of a new synthesis that combines insights of new classical, new Keynesian and real business cycle traditions into a dynamic, stochastic general equilibrium model that serves as a foundation for thinking about macro policy. That new synthesis has opened up the door to a new antithesis, which is being driven by advances in computing power and analytic techniques. This new synthesis is coalescing around developments in (...) complexity theory, automated general to specific econometric modeling, agent-based models, and non-linear and statistical dynamical models. This book thus provides the reader with an introduction to what might be called a Post Walrasian research program that is developing as the antithesis of the Walrasian DSGE synthesis. (shrink)

Many philosophers regard the imprecise credence framework as a more realistic model of probabilistic inferences with imperfect empirical information than the traditional precise credence framework. Hence, it is surprising that the literature lacks any discussion on how to update one’s imprecise credences when the given evidence itself is imprecise. To fill this gap, I consider two updating principles. Unfortunately, each of them faces a serious problem. The first updating principle, which I call “generalized conditionalization,” sometimes forces an agent to change (...) her imprecise degrees of belief even though she does not have new evidence. The second updating principle, which I call “the generalized dynamic Keynesian model,” may result in a very precise credal state although the agent does not have sufficiently strong evidence to justify such an informative doxastic state. This means that it is much more difficult to come up with an acceptable updating principle for the imprecise credence framework than one might have thought it would be. (shrink)

THE KEYNESIAN REVOLUTION AND ITS CRITICS: ISSUES OF THEORY AND POLICY FOR THE MONETARY PRODUCTION ECONOMY by Gordon A. Fletcher New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. 348pp., $35.00 A commonplace of the history of economic thought, repeated by Fletcher, holds that Keynes was the first economist of the 1930s to reject Say's Law of Markets. It is argued that Fletcher ignores many of Keynes's contemporaries, especially those influenced by Knut Wicksell, who disagreed with Say but who used a framework (...) for monetary analysis that was sounder in all respects than that of Keynes's General Theory. (shrink)

In their new indictments of global neoliberalism and the economic profession's culpability in its harms, Dani Rodrik and Joseph Stiglitz press the case for reconstructed globalization that generates benefits for all and not just for corporate and financial elites. Both books are deeply consistent with the insights of Karl Polanyi, who had identified the inherent contradictions of the project to create what he called a self-regulating economy. Like Polanyi, Rodrik and Stiglitz are attentive to the inadequacies of neoliberalism, and both (...) emphasize the capture of the state and international economic policy by elites, who have turned their backs on those left behind. While Stiglitz emphasizes that the profession knows how to fix the problem by applying modern Keynesian insights, Rodrik emphasizes the inherent epistemic limitations facing economists. Indeed, his arguments about development policy reflect the insights of Friedrich Hayek into the limits of economic expertise. (shrink)

Pirie's new book attempts a long-awaited Marxist analysis of the contemporary Korean state. It seeks to go beyond the binary opposition between neoliberal market-fundamentalism and Keynesian statism by persuasively demonstrating the indispensability of the state's role in the establishment of neoliberalism in Korea. It also provides an original and insightful analysis of the neoliberal regulation of finance in Korea. However, Pirie's central argument that the stable neoliberal régime of accumulation was established in Korea after the 1997 crisis can be (...) questioned in view of the trend in profitability, the same empirical evidence on which his argument rests. Pirie also needs to provide a more consistent Marxist class-analysis of capitalism in Korea. (shrink)

According to the fitting-attitude analysis of value , to be valuable is to be a fitting object of a pro-attitude. In earlier publications, setting off from this format of analysis, I proposed a modelling of value relations which makes room for incommensurability in value. In this paper, I first recapitulate the value modelling and then move on to suggest adopting a structurally similar analysis of probability. Indeed, many probability theorists from Poisson onwards did adopt an analysis of this kind. This (...) move allows to formally model probability and probability relations in essentially the same way as value and value relations. One of the advantages of the model is that we get a new account of Keynesian incommensurable probabilities, which goes beyond Keynes in distinguishing between different types of incommensurability. It also becomes possible to draw a clear distinction between incommensurability and vagueness in probability comparisons. (shrink)

This article offers reinterpretation of the current economic and political crisis through the lens of Gramsci’s concept of “interregnum,” departing from the model of “punctured equilibrium” to analyze the specific political dynamics of nonhegemonic periods between the breakdown of one ideological order and the emergence of a new one. Although political science has a range theories about periods of hegemony and paradigmatic stability, the periods between stable hegemonies remain distinctly undertheorized. A theoretical concept describing periods of interregnum is offered and (...) applied to the changes in economic ideology and political alignments that followed the breakdown of the liberal order in the interwar period and the postwar Keynesian consensus of the 1970s. The concept is then applied to the current juncture, in which the hegemony of neoliberalism has been shaken by the 2008 financial crisis but no clear successor has emerged. (shrink)

According to the fitting-attitude analysis of value (FA-analysis), to be valuable is to be a fitting object of a pro-attitude. In earlier publications, setting off from this format of analysis, I proposed a modelling of value relations which makes room for incommensurability in value. In this paper, I first recapitulate the value modelling and then move on to suggest adopting a structurally similar analysis of probability. Indeed, many probability theorists from Poisson onwards did adopt an analysis of this kind. This (...) move allows to formally model probability and probability relations in essentially the same way as value and value relations. One of the advantages of the model is that we get a new account of Keynesian incommensurable probabilities, which goes beyond Keynes in distinguishing between different types of incommensurability. It also becomes possible to draw a clear distinction between incommensurability and vagueness (indeterminacy) in probability comparisons. (shrink)

THE ECONOMICS OF TIME AND IGNORANCE by Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr. and Mario J. Rizzo New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985. 261pp., $34.95 O'Driscoll and Rizzo, two leading exponents of the Austrian subjectivist school of economics, claim to provide an original and powerful challenge to mainstream neoclassical economics. They also argue that there is much common ground between the Austrian approach and the recent development of Post Keynesian analysis. In this essay, the validity of such claims is analyzed, and the (...) shortcomings of the Austrian school's approach vis?à?vis Post Keynesian and neoclassical analysis is developed. (shrink)

The Clash of Economic Ideas interweaves the economic history of the last hundred years with the history of economic doctrines to understand how contrasting economic ideas have originated and developed over time to take their present forms. It traces the connections running from historical events to debates among economists, and from the ideas of academic writers to major experiments in economic policy. The treatment offers fresh perspectives on laissez faire, socialism and fascism; the Roaring Twenties, business cycle theories and the (...) Great Depression; Institutionalism and the New Deal; the Keynesian Revolution; and war, nationalization and central planning. After 1945, the work explores the postwar revival of invisible-hand ideas; economic development and growth, with special attention to contrasting policies and thought in Germany and India; the gold standard, the interwar gold-exchange standard, the postwar Bretton Woods system and the Great Inflation; public goods and public choice; free trade versus protectionism; and finally fiscal policy and public debt. (shrink)

For the last century, economic analysis has been wedded to the idea of equilibrium, in spite of the evident fact that most economic relationships are in flux. The theory of transformational growth in this work replaces equilibrium with history. The role of the market is not to allocate resources, but to generate innovations, which are 'selected' by competition in an evolutionary process. These innovations in turn change the way markets work and how they adjust, thus creating new problems and new (...) kinds of pressures to innovate. Different historical periods can be distinguished with a new one perhaps on the horizon. In each a distinctive style of technology prevails, associated with corresponding institutions and patterns of market behavior. The core relationships provide the foundations for a theory of monetary circulation, which makes possible a revised Keynesian approach, based on Classical foundations. (shrink)

Duncan Foley provides an alternative to Keynesian and 'new classical' macroeconomics, based on the Marxian theory of capital.

The problem advanced societies have tried to answer since the last part of the twentieth century can be ascribed to a fundamental question: how to go beyond the constitutive (and unsustainable) limit of nation-state capitalism, constrained by an excessively circumscribed and univocal idea of social organization, without losing the ability to govern? Or, expressed in other terms, how can you dismantle the center (the state) without losing the power to control? The answer to this (difficult) question has been sought for (...) along two main axes. The first has concerned the seizing of new opportunities distributed over a space larger than the national space. As historians have shown (Arrighi 1996), if global projection is a constant of capitalism only the disastrous politico-military vicissitudes of the first half of the twentieth century created the conditions according to which the nation-state capitalism model could be born, in the form that dominated the fifty years following the Second World War. But first the exhaustion of colonialism, then the urgency of the energy question, the signs of a possible demise of Anglo-Saxon hegemony and, subsequently, the collapse of the Soviet empire, have changed the rules of the game. Within a rapidly transforming international framework, the recovery of a global outlook promised the exploitation of important opportunities with the opening of new markets, the valorization of investment possibilities, the displacement and utilization of low-wage labor, financial speculation, the acquisition and control of energy resources and raw materials. It is a promise that Anglo-Saxon elites have contemplated since the early 1980s, the moment in which?to counter the increasingly worrying signs of decline of their hegemony?they abandoned the Keynesian doctrine to embrace the neoliberal doctrine. The second axis along which a new growth cycle has been developed has to do with the increased manipulation of meanings available individually and collectively. Such a process is formed from the combination of two rationales, the subjectivist imperative, which inscribes into social life some of the philosophical developments of the twentieth century, and the formation of De-territorialized Aesthetic Space, which makes technically possible, a degree of cultural mobility hitherto unthinkable. Both these factors facilitate the insertion of the immaterial dimension into the cycle of capitalist valorization, making it more readily available for exploitation by economic forces on a global scale. (shrink)

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, many economists have blamed economics for having failed to warn us. Paul Krugman, for example, in a well-known New York Times Magazine article, suggests that Classical economists were blinded by the beauty of mathematics, and that Keynesian economics is the path of the future. This paper argues that the evolution of economic thinking is much more nuanced than Krugman portrays it, and that instead of embracing what has become known as (...) Keynesian economics, macroeconomists should rather re-embrace the broader Classical economic tradition, of which Keynes was an important part. (shrink)

Joan Robinson was one of the greatest economists of the twentieth century and a fearless critic of free-market capitalism. A major figure in the controversial 'Cambridge School' of economics in the post-war period, she made fundamental contributions to the economics of international trade and development. In Economic Philosophy Robinson looks behind the curtain of economics to reveal a constant battle between economics as a science and economics as ideology, which she argued was integral to economics. In her customary vivid and (...) pellucid style, she criticizes early economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and neo-classical economists Alfred Marshall, Stanley Jevons and Leon Walras, over the question of value. She shows that what they respectively considered to be the generators of value - labour-time, marginal utility or preferences - are not scientific but 'metaphysical', and that it is frequently in ideology, not science, that we find the reason for the rejection of economic theories. She also weighs up the implications of the Keynesian revolution in economics, particularly whether Keynes's theories are applicable to developing economies. Robinson concludes with a prophetic lesson that resonates in today's turbulent and unequal economy: that the task of the economist is to combat the idea that the only values that count are those that can be measured in terms of money. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by Sheila Dow. (shrink)

_Eros and Economy: Jung, Deleuze, Sexual Difference_ explores the possibility that social relations between things, partially inscribed in their aesthetics, offer important insights into collective political-economic relations of domination and desire. Drawing on the analytical psychology of Carl Jung and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, this book focuses on the idea that desire or libido, overlaid by sexual difference, is a driving force behind the material manifestations of cultural production in practices as diverse as art or economy. Re-reading the history (...) of capitalism and aesthetics with an awareness of the forces of sexual difference reveals not just their integral role in the development of capitalist markets, but a new understanding of our political-economic relations as humans. The appearance of the energies of sexual difference is highlighted in a number of different historical periods and political economies, from the Rococo period of pre-revolutionary France, to the aesthetics and economics of Keynesian Bloomsbury, to our contemporary Postmodern sensibility. With these examples, Jenkins demonstrates that the very constitution of capitalist markets is affected by the interaction of these forces; and she argues that a conscious appreciation and negotiation of them is integral to an immanent, democratic understanding of power. With its unique application of Jungian theory, this book provides important new insights into debates surrounding art, aesthetics, and identity politics, as well as into the quest for autonomous, democratic institutions of politics and economics. As such, this book will appeal to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of Jung, psychoanalysis, political economy, cultural studies and gender studies, as well as those interested in the field of cultural economy. (shrink)

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, many economists have blamed economics for having failed to warn us. Paul Krugman, for example, in a well-known New York Times Magazine article, suggests that Classical economists were blinded by the beauty of mathematics, and that Keynesian economics is the path of the future. This paper argues that the evolution of economic thinking is much more nuanced than Krugman portrays it, and that instead of embracing what has become known as (...) Keynesian economics, macroeconomists should rather re-embrace the broader Classical economic tradition, of which Keynes was an important part. (shrink)

The economic crisis has exposed shortcomings in standard economic theory and provided an impetus for new economic thinking. But the theoretical debate in the wake of the crisis has been unduly constrained by the terms of the mainstream approach to economic theory. Like any approach, it is characterised by a way of framing reality, giving meaning to terms and setting criteria for good argument. It also determines how any economic theory is understood, whether from the history of economic thought or (...) from the contemporary literature. But there are other approaches to economics which would open up the field to a much wider range of possibilities for new economic thinking. Addressing the challenge that any reader bases her understanding on her own approach, the purpose of this paper is to attempt to explain what it means to consider different approaches and why it matters for policy. This is done by discussing two features of the financial crisis which pose particular problems for economic theory. These are the role of changing market sentiment in driving asset prices on the one hand and the breakdown of trust relationships in banking on the other (the moral hazard issue). We will see how these are addressed by mainstream theory and by alternative approaches. First, market sentiment is discussed within the mainstream rational-optimising framework, where risk is quantifiable, and compared with the Keynesian approach based on the general uncertainty of knowledge, where reason, evidence and sentiment are integrated. The moral hazard issue is then discussed in its mainstream form in terms of rational opportunism and in its institutionalist form in terms of the foundation of social relations (including relations between institutions) in trust. It is shown that different ways of approaching theorising in each case imply different policy measures. It is argued further that an exclusively deductive mathematical approach to analysis of market sentiment and trust is unduly limiting and that a more pluralist approach would more fully address the issues. (shrink)

Starting on Bourdieu’s approach to precariousness, this article analyzes this phenomenon as a new flexible norm that displaces the Fordist social norm. The authors argue, based on Gramsci’s study of Fordism, that precarization creates a mechanism of discipline for the legitimization of the loss of both labour and social rights, destroying the Keynesian social pact. Such disciplining happens coercively, both by the use of new technologies and by the generalization of the function of Marx’s industrial reserve army to all (...) productive strata; and also, by consensus, through a transformation in the work culture, leading to a “new flexible man” with a flagrant loss of its autonomy. (shrink)

Le développement est devenu une préoccupation majeure depuis un demi-siècle. L'idée dominante - confiant à l'État l'impulsion décisive et à la nation une souveraineté ombrageuse - a basculé au profit de la loi du marché et de l'ouverture internationale. Néo-keynésienne ou néo-classique, l'analyse du développement a reçu quatre critiques majeures tenant à la causalité, au processus, à la rationalité et au fonctionnement. Les limites d'une action qui laisse les deux tiers de l'humanité en marge du processus, suscitent l'émergence de nouveaux (...) critères d'équité, de gouvernance, d'éthique ou d'écologie. Les atouts de la communauté francophone s'inscrivent dans une connaissance empirique de cette diversité, elle transparaît dans ses approches universitaites, mais elle manque encore d'un ancrage suffisant pour donner à l'ensemble une vigueur économique de référence et une solidarité effective.Development has been a major topic for the last fifty years. The dominant idea – letting the State provide the decisive impulse for progress and the Nation a prickly form of sovereignty – has shifted in favour of market forces and the international context. Both neo-Keynesian and neo-classical forms of analysis were criticized on four levels : causality, process, rationality and functioning. The limits of a policy which excludes two thirds of humanity have led to new criteria of equity, ethics, governance and ecology arising. The French speaking community has the advantage of possessing good empirical knowledge of diversity which can be seen in the rich and varied approaches of researchers. However this knowledge is not sufficiently anchored to foster strong economic development and effective solidarity in the whole community. (shrink)

The sudden growth and glorification of the penal state in the United States after the mid-1970s (and in Western Europe two decades later) is not a response to the evolution of crime, but a reaction to—and a diversion from—the social insecurity produced by the fragmentation of wage labor and the destabilization of ethnoracial hierarchies following the discarding of the Fordist-Keynesian compact. It partakes of a new government of poverty wedding restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare,” which ensnares the precarious fractions (...) of the postindustrial proletariat in a carceral-assistential net designed to steer them towards deregulated employment or to contain them in their dispossessed neighborhoods and in the booming prisons that have become their satellites. This policy of penalization of urban marginality guided by moral behaviorism partakes of a broader reengineering and remasculinizing of the state that has rendered obsolete the traditional scholarly and policy division between welfare and crime. It must be grasped, not under the narrow rubric of repression, but under the generative category of production, as it has spawned new state agencies, social types, knowledges and experts. It makes the study of incarceration an essential chapter in the sociology of the state and social stratification in the era of triumphant neoliberalism. (shrink)

In the analysis of contemporary capitalism, it is important to combine neoliberalism (the strengthening of the power of the capitalist class, in a new phase) and imperialism (the exploitation of peripherical countries). The contradictions of this newsocial order are numerous: first, the resistances that it fosters, then the desquilibria evident, in particular, in the United States. But imperialism at the age of neoliberalism also manifests itself in a new configuration particularly favorable to this country: the export of capitals and the (...) financing of the US economy by the rest of the world. In the United States, this era can also be characterized by the new configuration of class alliances at the top of the social hierarchy : big capitalist owners and top managers. This consolidation manifests itself in the ongoing drift to the right, when the necessity of a compromise uniting managers and popular classes, as in the Keynesian compromise, is urgent. (shrink)

This book is a critique of rationalism. It aims to explain both its powerful contributions to mathematics and physical sciences, where our arithmetical, geometrical, and mechanical intuitions have had a highly productive role in the development of pure theory, and its disastrous failures in cosmology and the moral sciences. In these supposed sciences, rationalism has all but destroyed the social conscience of the West, by creating the disastrous political philosophy of neoliberalism. To reset our moral compasses, we must develop new, (...) and socially just versions, of the old welfare states. And, to restore democracy, we must return to Keynesian economic management" -- back cover. (shrink)

While, as Marx argued, periods of expanded accumulation present the best conditions for increasing working-class living standards, the expansion that began in 1982 was based in large part on the rapidfallin the value of labour-power in the US. This recovery and rapid rise in the rate of surplus-value in the US was enabled by the collapse of union-resistance beginning in 1979 and the strategic choices made by union-leaders across the economy from that time on. The expansion was sustained in the (...) 1980s by dramatic work-reorganisation, enabled by the embrace of labour-management cooperation-schemes by much of the trade-union leadership, and the restructuring of several major industries that undermined the industry-wide bargaining on which rising postwar incomes had been based. Productivity, boosted by lean production-methods, would continue to outstrip real wages up until the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008 and resume again in the wake of a weak recovery in the US. The rapid geographic expansion of capital after 1990 provided new investment-possibilities, as did the explosion of financial instruments. What stands out, however, is that rising productivity, far from providing the basis for increases in working-class income, had become coupled with flat or declining real wages and a fall in the value of labour-power as the necessary condition to sustain almost any level of growth in the real economy. The link between productivity and wage-increases, central to Keynesian and institutional collective-bargaining theory, had been broken and Marx’s idea of the most favourable conditions stood on its head. The breaking of this link had, in the final analysis, been an outcome of class-struggle in which capital had the upper hand. All of this underlines the failed strategies and practices of most of the trade-union leadership in the US since 1979. New approaches to the workplace and broader forms of mobilisation will be needed. Signs of worker-resistance to the latest neoliberal clampdowns in Latin America, Europe, China, and even the US, however, may point to a renewed era of intensified class-struggle. (shrink)

Over the past century, the rise and fall of economic policy orders has been shaped by a paradox, as intellectual and institutional stability have repeatedly caused market instability and crisis. To highlight such dynamics, this volume offers a theory of economic ideas in political time. The author counters paradigmatic and institutionalist views of ideas as enabling self-reinforcing path dependencies, offering an alternative social psychological argument that ideas which initially reduce uncertainty can subsequently fuel misplaced certainty and crises. Historically, the book (...) then traces the development and decline of the progressive, Keynesian, and neoliberal orders, arguing that each order's principled foundations were gradually displaced by macroeconomic models that obscured new causes of the Great Depression, Great Stagflation, and Global Financial Crisis. Finally, in policy terms, Widmaier stresses the costs of intellectual autonomy, as efforts to 'prevent the last crisis' have repeatedly obscured new causes of crises. (shrink)

This book examines the utopian dimension of contemporary social and political thought. Arguing for a utopian optic for the human sciences, el-Ojeili claims that major transformations of the utopian constellation have occurred since the end of the twentieth century. Following a survey of major utopian shifts in the modern period, el-Ojeili focuses on three spaces within today’s utopian constellation. At the liberal centre, we see a splintering effect, particularly after the global financial crisis of 2008: a contingent neo-liberalism, a neo- (...) class='Hi'>Keynesian turn, and a liberalism of fear. At the far-Right margin, we see the consolidation of post-fascism, a combination of “the future in the past”, elements of the post-modern present, and appeals to a novel future. Finally, at the far-Left, a new communism has emerged, with novel positions on resistance, maps of power, and a contemporary variant of the Left’s artistic critique. The Utopian Constellation will be of interest to scholars and students across the human sciences with an interest in utopian studies, ideological and discourse analysis, the sociology of knowledge, and the study of political culture. (shrink)

Ever since Adam Smith, economists have been preoccupied with the puzzle of economic growth. The standard mainstream models of economic growth were and often still are based either on assumptions of diminishing returns on capital with technological innovation or on endogenous dynamics combined with a corresponding technological and institutional setting. An alternative model of economic growth emerged from the Cambridge School of Keynesian economists in the 1950s and 1960s. This model - developed mainly by Luigi Pasinetti - emphasizes the (...) importance of demand, human learning and the growth dynamics of industrial systems. Finally, in the past decade, new mainstream models have emerged incorporating technology or demand-based structural change and extending the notion of balanced growth. This collection of essays reassesses Pasinetti's theory of structural dynamics in the context of these recent developments, with contributions from economists writing in both the mainstream and the Cambridge Keynesian traditions and including Luigi Pasinetti, William Baumol, Geoffrey Harcourt and Nobel laureate Robert Solow. (shrink)

This is not another "law-and-econ" bashing symposium. Nor is the symposium's title intended to denigrate Chicago School law and economics any more than the term "Post-Keynesian economics" was intended to denigrate the work of John Maynard Keynes. Instead, this symposium marks the fact that many practitioners of law and economics have moved well beyond the stereotypes familiar to most legal academics. Rather than designating an entirely new school of thought, the term "Post-Chicago law and economics" refers to a new (...) era in which a variety of new questions about law and lawmaking is being asked and a variety of promising economic techniques is being used to answer them. Yet most legal academics who, like me, are not part of the law and economics movement are generally unaware of these changes. The purpose of this "Symposium on Post-Chicago Law and Economics" is to bring some of these new methods and questions to the attention of mainstream legal academics and others. The hope is that those who have shunned the economic analysis of law in the past may wish to reconsider their stance in light of what Post-Chicago law and economics has to offer. To facilitate this, the author uses this Foreword to summarize the new directions suggested by each of the symposium contributors, most of whom are practitioners of law and economics. (shrink)

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Keynesian model of government regulation and social entitlement was widely overrun by a resurgence of marketplace economics. Far from fulfilling its promise of unbridled personal freedom and global prosperity, however, the ensuing decade of economic crisis and ongoing disenfranchisement has led many to rethink fundamental beliefs about social justice and the distribution of wealth. Not surprisingly, John Dewey’s call for a “Great Community” figures prominently in this discussion. In 2009, Omar Swartz, Katia Campbell (...) and Christina Pestana explored the promise of Dewey’s democratic community in Neo-Pragmatism, Communication, and the Culture of Creative Democracy. This new collection of.. (shrink)

In the analysis of contemporary capitalism, it is important to combine neoliberalism (the strengthening of the power of the capitalist class, in a new phase) and imperialism (the exploitation of peripherical countries). The contradictions of this newsocial order are numerous: first, the resistances that it fosters, then the desquilibria evident, in particular, in the United States. But imperialism at the age of neoliberalism also manifests itself in a new configuration particularly favorable to this country: the export of capitals and the (...) financing of the US economy by the rest of the world. In the United States, this era can also be characterized by the new configuration of class alliances at the top of the social hierarchy : big capitalist owners and top managers. This consolidation manifests itself in the ongoing drift to the right, when the necessity of a compromise uniting managers and popular classes, as in the Keynesian compromise, is urgent. (shrink)

In the analysis of contemporary capitalism, it is important to combine neoliberalism (the strengthening of the power of the capitalist class, in a new phase) and imperialism (the exploitation of peripherical countries). The contradictions of this newsocial order are numerous: first, the resistances that it fosters, then the desquilibria evident, in particular, in the United States. But imperialism at the age of neoliberalism also manifests itself in a new configuration particularly favorable to this country: the export of capitals and the (...) financing of the US economy by the rest of the world. In the United States, this era can also be characterized by the new configuration of class alliances at the top of the social hierarchy : big capitalist owners and top managers. This consolidation manifests itself in the ongoing drift to the right, when the necessity of a compromise uniting managers and popular classes, as in the Keynesian compromise, is urgent. (shrink)

This contribution argues, first, that pre-national forms of state were not displaced or supplanted by a new, national form. What we call the nation-state was not the successor to imperial or city-states but was itself a form of the European imperial city-states that had driven the expansion of capitalism in previous centuries. It argues, second, that national states emerged only after 1945 and only in a handful of states where, through welfare reforms and market and industry regulation, investment and production (...) were made to serve the expansion and integration of national markets. Third, with the dismantling of Keynesian policies in these states, pre-national (pre-Keynesian) structures are resurfacing. What scholars describe as the emergence of ‘post-national spatialities’ and of ‘global cities’ and city regions represents the resurgence of a durable and historically dominant form of state: the imperial city-state form. The ‘re-scaling’ of nation-states and growing prominence of ‘global cities’ and ‘city regions’ are heralding the end of the brief history of actually existing nation-states and the re-deployment of the imperial city-state model. (shrink)

The Urbanization of Capital. This article analyses the creation of capitalist urban space during the socalled « Keynesian », or « Fordist », epoch and the transition from this epoch to the era of so-called « post-Fordism » which we are currently experiencing. The production of a spatial fix which is specific to each phase of development is, for capitalism, both a means of managing its internal contradictions, thus ensuring its survival, and of displacing these contradictions onto a new (...) terrain. This terrain is the result notably of the tensions and constraints inherent in the spatial fix inherited from the previous period and remodelled by the constant transformation of the mode of production. The Keynesian urban space, constituted by cities oriented towards demand, and moulded by the joint intervention of state planning and credit-based finance, is succeeded by the post-Fordist city, which is reshaped by intensified interurban and interregional competition, and by the exacerbation of the polarisation of, and separation between, social classes. The reproduction of social relations by and through space poses new problems, at the same time that it opens new possibilities, for class struggles and alternative socialist projects. (shrink)

The Cambridge Capital Controversy was one of the most significant debates in Twentieth Century economics. First published in 1972, this book provides an accessible reconstruction of the controversy with detailed discussion of the major points raised by its primary protagonists: Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson on the post-Keynesian side and Robert Solow and Paul Samuelson on the neo-classical side. The book is now considered to be a classic. This fiftieth anniversary edition comes with a new preface by the author (...) and two new afterwords that reflect on the author's contribution to the field and the significance of the book in the history of economics. Topics covered include the measurement of capital, the revival of interest in Irving Fisher's rate of return on investment, the double-switching debate, Sraffa's prelude to a critique of neoclassical theory, and the 'new' theories of the rate of profits in capitalist society. (shrink)

What I consider in this paper are various forms of government, various technologies and discursive regimes of government that are in common use today. What interests me are the categories and tools, practical dispositifs and languages that developed over the last decades ‘to constitute, define, organize, and instrumentalize the strategies that individuals, acting freely, may use to deal with one another’ (Foucault). The paper considers first the neo-liberal wish to reassert the individual as alone in responsibility for his/her own life (...) after the unfortunate digression into Welfare Statism and Keynesian economics, source of all ills. It then focuses on some material and social technologies that encourage people to accept full and complete ‘self-sovereignty’. This section leads to a discussion on the new demands (and resistance) society imposed on this liberal normative ideal. It notably considers the growing demands to ‘participate’ in decision processes and to be environmentally friendly. In section Les Mots et Les Choses: A New Discursive Regime , it considers the discursive regime that progressively took shape and which currently permeates international governance bodies of all stripes—from the World Bank to the Conference of Parties for Climate Change. In the final section, it comes back to the initial question and considers what these changes actually mean for the democratic order as constituted over the past 250 years. (shrink)