******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
(From 2016 but still relevant.)
Jacobin’s proposed demand for “full employment” would require, in fact,
an extraordinary reinvigoration of the global capitalist economy, a
sustained spike in economic growth and job-creation the scale of which
would be well-nigh unprecedented. Rather than coming to terms with the
forbidding landscape described by Summers, Carney, and Brenner, among
others, the journal has appealed to entirely untenable scenarios. In a
recent post on Jacobin entitled “When Wonks Attack,” J.W. Mason makes
the extravagant claim that, according to “orthodox economic theory” and
“every macroeconomics textbook,” the deep recession of the past eight
years must necessarily produce, as if through the momentum of a pendulum
swing, a “period of exceptionally strong growth.” According to Mason’s
own back-of-the-envelope calculations, using the instruments put at his
disposal by the regnant economic models, the next
near-decade—coinciding, it goes without saying, with a two-term Sanders
presidency—should bring an extraordinary resurgence of capitalist
dynamism to the tune of 5% growth over the next eight years, and the
addition of some three hundred thousand job per month. Such an outré
appeal to “orthodoxy,” which requires actively bracketing, in a
desperate Verneinung, empirical analyses generated across the political
spectrum, is the moving sand on which even an apparently modest proposal
of a return to tighter labor markets and rising wages—much less “full”
employment—is premised.
full: https://brooklynrail.org/2016/04/field-notes/let-us-be-terrible
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
