"Shows How the Ascendance of Neoliberalism Is in Large Part a Reaction Against Not Just Marxism or Workers' Movements but, Specifically, Keynesian Liberalism"

"What might a genuinely Keynesian American economy look like? Public works spending on bridges, roads, parks, levees, railroads, and transit would help repair our long-neglected infrastructure. Investments in scientific research (including basic science), medical research, and green technology would unleash virtuous cycles of growth and innovation. But Keynes wouldn't stop there. A strong believer in the idea that the economy should serve human needs—not the other way around—he would support funding for libraries, universities, and other regional cultural institutions, trusting that these institutions might help diffuse our urban-rural divides."

At The Hedgehog Review, Charlie Tyson reviews Zachary D. Carter's The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes.

"Any Business Deal Appears Like a Small Battle in a Never-Ending War for Financial Supremacy"

"His rejection of Friedman's vision of trade is clearly not a considered view but a gut reaction. The story he tells himself about capitalism is one that involves a high-stakes game of winners and losers—those who beat, and those who get beaten. As such, it seems axiomatic to him: In any deal, whether it involves individuals or independent nations, only one side can win. As a matter of economic science, Donald Trump may be wrong, but with respect to the sensibility that guides his approach to business and colors his understanding of capitalism, it may be the case that the GOP nominee is simply a man of his time—and ours."

John Paul Rollert at The Atlantic describes Donald Trump as an avatar of "Sociopathic Capitalism."

TINA Has Turned

"What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it's not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st century."

George Monbiot in The Guardian previews his new book, How Did We Get Into This Mess?

"Full Employment Was a Lucky Exception"

"To Taylor, calling full employment the general state and allowing one unlucky exception turns Keynes upside down. And look where this confusion has brought us, he adds. Take the current eurozone disaster. For two decades, the European Union bureaucracy in Brussels, the German Council of Economic Experts, and a chorus of others, branded Germany, the 'sick man of Europe,' as suffering from a sclerotic supply side: rigid labor unions, impediments to layoffs, a burdensome welfare state. But German labor costs to produce output sank steadily, and Germany generated huge trade surpluses—hardly signs of a sclerotic supply side. Yet growth has barely averaged 1 percent a year since 2000.
"The problem? Weak demand, according to Taylor. The chorus ignored demand because the mainstream says it cannot affect long-run growth and employment. But it does. Now the same chorus is telling southern Europe to institute 'reforms' like Germany. But if the German model doesn't work well in Germany, how can it work in Greece, Italy, or Spain? A misguided idea is undermining the European Union itself."

Jonathan Schlefer in The Boston Globe looks at John Maynard Keynes's influence on current economists.

"A 'Race between Education and Technology'"

"Everyone should be able to benefit from productivity gains—in that, Keynes was united with his successors. His worry about technological unemployment was mainly a worry about a 'temporary phase of maladjustment' as society and the economy adjusted to ever greater levels of productivity. So it could well prove. However, society may find itself sorely tested if, as seems possible, growth and innovation deliver handsome gains to the skilled, while the rest cling to dwindling employment opportunities at stagnant wages."


The Economist discusses the danger of "technological unemployment."

"A Particular Kind of Socialism"

Whatever its political vagaries, people bought the NS just as much for the 'back half,' outstanding books and arts pages that gave one of the best reflections of serious English culture for most of the last century. Evelyn Waugh was not the only one amused by what he called the notorious contrast 'between the Jekyll of culture, wit and ingenious competition and the Hyde of querulous atheism and economics which prefaces it.'"

In The New Republic, Geoffrey Wheatcroft marks the centennial of the New Statesman.

But Somewhere the Party Never Ends

"The coming of stagflation, and the seeming incapacity of economic orthodoxy to deal with it, discredited the Keynesians and lifted the monetarists. Economic policy didn’t seem to be working, and as the 1970s progressed, the pressure to make a change became irresistible. Monetarists ascended to key policy positions, but this ascent did not mark the capitulation of center-left governing practices to the neoliberal faith in free markets, as right-wingers like to claim. The idea that accepting monetarism meant accepting free markets is the result of a retrospective 'conflation of monetarism with a theoretically separate set of arguments about the supposed superiority of markets over government intervention in the economy.'"

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Michael W. Clune reviews Daniel Stedman Jones's Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics.

"The Boom, not the Slump, Is the Right Time for Austerity at the Treasury"

"The bottom line is that 2011 was a year in which our political elite obsessed over short-term deficits that aren’t actually a problem and, in the process, made the real problem—a depressed economy and mass unemployment—worse."

In The New York Times, Paul Krugman argues that circumstances have, once again, vindicated Keynesian economics.

"Weaponized Keynesianism"

"At a fundamental level, the opponents of any serious job-creation program know perfectly well that such a program would probably work, for the same reason that defense cuts would raise unemployment. But they don’t want voters to know what they know, because that would hurt their larger agenda—keeping regulation and taxes on the wealthy at bay."

Paul Krugman in The New York Times calls out conservative supporters of military spending.

The Market Utopian

"We're faced then with two intriguing mysteries. Why did the Nozick of 1975 confuse capital with human capital? And why did Nozick by 1989 feel the need to disavow the Nozick of 1975? The key, I think, is recognizing the two mysteries as twin expressions of a single, primal, human fallibility: the need to attribute success to one's own moral substance, failure to sheer misfortune. The effectiveness of the Wilt Chamberlain example, after all, is best measured by how readily you identify with Wilt Chamberlain. Anarchy is nothing if not a tour-de-force, an advertisement not just for libertarianism but for the sinuous intelligence required to put over so peculiar a thought experiment. In the early '70s, Nozick—and this is audible in the writing—clearly identified with Wilt: He believed his talents could only be flattered by a free market in high value-add labor. By the late '80s, in a world gone gaga for Gordon Gekko and Esprit, he was no longer quite so sure."

Stephen Metcalf in Slate ponders why libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick abandoned libertarianism.

And a few days later, Metcalf responds to his critics.

"Those with More Education than Money Against Those with More Money than Education"

"Too often, conservatives dupe themselves. They wrap themselves in closed information systems based upon pretend information. In this closed information system, banks can collapse without injuring the rest of the economy, tax cuts always pay for themselves and Congressional earmarks cause the federal budget deficit. Even the market collapse has not shaken some conservatives out of their closed information system. It enfolded them more closely within it. This is how to understand the Glenn Beck phenomenon. Every day, Beck offers alternative knowledge—an alternative history of the United States and the world, an alternative system of economics, an alternative reality. As corporate profits soar, the closed information system insists that the free-enterprise system is under assault. As prices slump, we are warned of imminent hyperinflation. As black Americans are crushed under Depression-level unemployment, the administration’s policies are condemned by some conservatives as an outburst of Kenyan racial revenge against the white overlord."

David Frum in The New York Times offers lessons from the last two years.

Reason Thunders in Its Crater

"In the end, Obama is more likely to benefit than suffer from this smear. The critics hope to persuade the public that he is a dangerous extremist far removed from the desires of the average person. When conservatives like Mike Huckabee claim that 'Lenin and Stalin would love' the administration's policies, though, they sound like 3-year-olds crying about monsters under the bed."

Steve Chapman in Reason argues that Barack Obama is not a socialist.

And Andrew Sullivan in The Times discusses Obama's sense of timing.

The Political Consequences of Unemployment

"Indeed, the whole point of The General Theory was about preserving what was good and necessary in capitalism, as well as protecting it against authoritarian attacks, by separating microeconomics, the economics of prices and the firm, from macroeconomics, the economics of the economy as a whole. In order to preserve economic freedom in the former, which Keynes thought was critical for efficiency, increased government intervention in the latter was unavoidable. While pure free marketers lament this development, the alternative, as Keynes saw it, was the complete destruction of capitalism and its replacement by some form of socialism."

Bruce Bartlett in Forbes argues that John Maynard Keynes, "the principal bête noire of free market economists," was actually a conservative.

Uneconomic Man

"Above all, they challenge the reigning free-market ideology of the past 30 years or so, from the rise of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to the abrupt arrival of the present crisis late last year. That ideology held that markets should operate free of government because they were rational. But if animal spirits influence behavior, then government must play a broad, disciplinary role, and do so permanently."

Louis Uchitelle in The New York Times reviews George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller's Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism.

A Stimulating Problem

"It is a sign of how completely Republican thinking now dominates discussions of economic policy that so few of the stimulus ideas floating around Washington involve increasing federal spending. It used to be that stimulus debates were about a tax cut vs. a spending increase. An increase in federal spending can goose the economy just like cutting taxes. The government builds a bridge or a highway, people get jobs, take their families to Olive Garden, which hires more waiters, and so on. In fact, direct government spending is a more efficient stimulus than an equivalent tax cut because all of it gets spent. When actual people get hold of the money, a few might have an unpatriotic tendency to save some of it."

Michael Kinsley in Time criticizes current fiscal-stimulus proposals.