Paul Krugman launched out in his blog recently on yet another justification for the superiority of Keynesian economics (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jun/06/how-case-austerity-has-crumbled/). He put it: “Keynesian economics rests fundamentally on the proposition that macroeconomics isn’t a morality play—that depressions are essentially a technical malfunction." And "Keynes’s masterwork, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, is noteworthy—and revolutionary—for saying almost nothing about what happens in economic booms".
Two things strike me here. Is it true that recessions and even depressions are really a “technical malfunction’ in an otherwise perfectly functioning market economy. and the job of economistsis thus simple:“to figure out how to repair that technical problem” (Krugman). And second, does it not matter to explain what happens in booms? Surely, what happens in booms is very important in explaining why capitalism has slumps and what happens in them. Without an explanation of the laws of motion of capitalism in booms, we cannot understand the slumps – but apparently not for Keynes or Krugman. http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/its-a-technical-malfunction/
_______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
