"Here's a Marxist political economic final exam for Keynesians: What do Keynesian ideas on abating recession have to teach the Occupy Wall Street, Chicago, LA, etc movement ?"
being the closest to a keynesian that pen-l is probably ever going to get, i feel the need to respond to this. first i think "keynesian" ideas to not begin or end with "abating recession". certainly that is what neoclassical keynesianism evolved into, but when i talk about keynesianism, I'm speaking about what keynes actually wrote and people responding and building on what he actually wrote. in this context keynes's writing, and especially minsky's work following up on it, can contribute greatly to understanding the functioning of wall street, and point to the most effective ways to contain the the fundamental instability financial processes generate. indeed, minsky called his view "the wall street paradigm". " How would inculcating those activists with Keynesian ideas be different from steering them to the Democratic Party ( for the anti-Democratic Party Obessessionists) ?" truly understanding keynesian and minskyan ideas would reveal how terrible democratic economic policies have been for decades. it would probably repel people from the democrats further. " How much does government spending abate recession ( quantify it) ? To the anti-Obamaites, did the O Stimulus abate recession and unemployment at all ? Would a Stimulus twice as large saved us from the current supe-high unemployment rate ? or not ? Three times as large ? How precise really is Keynesian science ?" the revised gdp numbers seem to show pretty clearly that an anemic, but positive, growth rate only arose during times the stimulus was active. state and local government policies have been severely contractionary despite a growing federal budget deficit. the multipliers on much of the designed stimulus were quite low because of cuts to aid to states and increases in tax cuts. clearly a larger stimulus would have reduced unemployment more. however, a truly keynesian economics would suggest increasing the demand for labor directly so as to avoid bottlenecks and more directly increase labor's share of national income. i disagree intensely with the contention that "demand for public works programs is Marxist, more than Keynesian". economics in general does not have controlled experiments, so i would never call it a "science" but i think the evidence we have is pretty clear that increasing demand for labor will increase employment and doing so directly will cause more quantity expansions then price expansions, especially if combined with policies that redistribute income away from rentiers and reduce unproductive labor relative to productive labor (admittedly, probably more of a marxist idea even though minsky picked up on it and ran with it). -- -Nathan Tankus _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
