Debates In Macroeconomics From The Great Depression To The Long Recession

This book assesses major schools of thought in macroeconomic theory between the Great Depression and the Long Recession, focusing on their analysis of cycles, crises and macro-policy. It explores the road from the dominance of Keynesian ideas to those of New Classical Macroeconomics (NCM) toward the end of the millennium. The book covers the early influential work of Knut Wicksell; the economic debates of the 1930s, with core contributions from John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek; the rise of Keynesianism in the 1950s and its decline since the 1970s; the rise of Monetarism in the 1960s; and NCM’s subsequent rise to prominence. Finally, the book outlines how macroeconomics has evolved from its birth in the 1930s as a theory separate from microeconomics, resulting in a split between macro- and micro-theories, and ended up with a new hegemonic paradigm based on microfoundations. The ensuing policy thinking witnessed a transformation from "active" macro-policy after the Great Depression to a far more "passive" macro-policy during the last quarter of the twentieth century, which may have contributed to missing the signs of the impending Long Recession of 2008. “When the 2008 crisis struck, macroeconomists were caught with models that were theoretically elegant yet inappropriate to the needs of the moment. A broader historical perspective may have prevented the jettisoning of Keynesian models that had proved useful in the past and might have done so again. This highly readable book by Arie Arnon is a wonderful antidote to economists’ short time horizon and contributes mightily to restore the profession’s “collective memory” of the diversity of ideas within macroeconomics.” Professor Dani Rodrik, Harvard Kennedy School

This is an enjoyable and immensely readable book which combines in interview format, reflections by prominent economists on contemporary and subsequent explanations of the Great Depression with what Bernanke in his foreword refers to as highbrow gossip concerning the lives and experiences of those selected economists who lived through the era. W.R. Garside, Australian Economic History Review The tone of the book is broad, and it moves fluidly between discussion of grand intellectual debates about what mattered, personal thoughts of the interviewer and his subjects, formative experiences, events and gossip. Christopher M. Meissner, The International History Review This volume is built around transcripts of interviews conducted in 1997 and 1998 with 11 noteworthy economists who had been graduate students in the 1930s. They were invited to reflect on how the Great Depression affected them, both personally and professionally. As Ben S. Bernanke remarks in the foreword, this is first-rate highbrow gossip . The result is both instructive and entertaining. William J. Barber, Journal of Economic History The interviews with famous senior economists contained in this enjoyable book achieve two important, and quite distinct, goals. First, they provide invaluable insights into the history of theorizing about the Depression. In these conversations we see the struggles of the brightest young economists of their generation to reconcile old paradigms of the efficiency and optimality of free markets with the hard facts of mass unemployment and economic collapse they saw around them in the 1930s. In their attempts to find new answers we see the roots of current ideas and debates in economics. These interviews do an excellent job of recapturing the sense of uncertainty, the feeling of grappling with an intractable puzzle, that almost every one of these economists experienced. The second achievement of these interviews is to provide, well, first-rate highbrow gossip. The interviewees are outstanding economists but they are also an exceptional group of people. They hail from around the world, from a variety of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. Each, in one way or the other, found his or her way to professional prominence, often in the face of substantial adversity. From the foreword by Ben S. Bernanke, Princeton University, US It is an accepted truism that the Great Depression did more for the development of modern economics than any other single event. Some of the greatest economists of the twentieth century were inspired to go into the field as a direct result of their experiences during this period. This book explores the most prominent economic explanations of the Great Depression and how it affected the lives, experiences, and subsequent thinking of economists who lived through that era. Presented in interview format, this collection of conversations with Moses Abramovitz, Morris Adelman, Milton Friedman, Albert Hart, Charles Kindleberger, Wassily Leontief, Paul Samuelson, Anna Schwartz, James Tobin, Herbert Stein and Victor Zarnowitz provides a record of their reflections on the economics of the Great Depression and on the major events which occurred during those critical years. This volume is also another chapter in the legacy of the interwar generation of economists and is intended as a token of gratitude for the contributions they have made to the economics profession. Randall Parker has given us a window into the lives of these gifted scholars and an important glimpse into the world that shaped them. Any student or scholar of economics will find this homage to and record of the brightest voices to come out of this critical time to be indispensable.

This book collects selected articles addressing several currently debated issues in the field of international macroeconomics. They focus on the role of the central banks in the debate on how to come to terms with the long-term decline in productivity growth, insufficient aggregate demand, high economic uncertainty and growing inequalities following the global financial crisis. Central banks are of considerable importance in this debate since understanding the sluggishness of the recovery process as well as its implications for the natural interest rate are key to assessing output gaps and the monetary policy stance. The authors argue that a more dynamic domestic and external aggregate demand helps to raise the inflation rate, easing the constraint deriving from the zero lower bound and allowing monetary policy to depart from its current ultra-accommodative position. Beyond macroeconomic factors, the book also discusses a supportive financial environment as a precondition for the rebound of global economic activity, stressing that understanding capital flows is a prerequisite for economic-policy decisions.

Back to the future: a heterodox economist rewrites Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money to serve as the basis for a macroeconomics for the twenty-first century. John Maynard Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money was the most influential economic idea of the twentieth century. But, argues Stephen Marglin, its radical implications were obscured by Keynes's lack of the mathematical tools necessary to argue convincingly that the problem was the market itself, as distinct from myriad sources of friction around its margins. Marglin fills in the theoretical gaps, revealing the deeper meaning of the General Theory. Drawing on eight decades of discussion and debate since the General Theory was published, as well as on his own research, Marglin substantiates Keynes's intuition that there is no mechanism within a capitalist economy that ensures full employment. Even if deregulating the economy could make it more like the textbook ideal of perfect competition, this would not address the problem that Keynes identified: the potential inadequacy of aggregate demand. Ordinary citizens have paid a steep price for the distortion of Keynes's message. Fiscal policy has been relegated to emergencies like the Great Recession. Monetary policy has focused unduly on inflation. In both cases the underlying rationale is the false premise that in the long run at least the economy is self-regulating so that fiscal policy is unnecessary and inflation beyond a modest 2 percent serves no useful purpose. Fleshing out Keynes's intuition that the problem is not the warts on the body of capitalism but capitalism itself, Raising Keynes provides the foundation for a twenty-first-century macroeconomics that can both respond to crises and guide long-run policy.

This book covers a lot of ground in contemporary macroeconomics, from fundamental theories such as market structures and equilibrium to emerging concepts that reflect the most critical challenges of modern times, including economic slowdowns, the resilience of public health systems, digitalization, environmental footprints, and many more. The COVID-19 outbreak has aggravated the recurrent problems of poverty and income inequality between countries, food insecurity and hunger, unemployment, and social disorders that have resulted in the exacerbation of political, economic, and trade tensions between countries. In view of the damaging consequences of the pandemic for the entire global economy, the book examines how existing macroeconomic tools and policies could be adapted to the new normal to ensure sustainable post-pandemic development and growth. The main text is interspersed with real-life illustrations and cases that demonstrate practical implications of the concepts under study. This makes the reading relevant and active. Every chapter starts with learning objectives and ends with a series of questions and quizzes that enable easier reinforcement of the course content. This book is written mainly for students, but it would be much useful to the broader public audience, including postgraduates, researchers, and business people who will be able to learn all recent updates about macroeconomics and the post-pandemic perspectives of the global economy.

“The World in Depression is the best book on the subject, and the subject, in turn, is the economically decisive decade of the century so far.”—John Kenneth Galbraith

This book was originally published by Macmillan in 1936. It was voted the top Academic Book that Shaped Modern Britain by Academic Book Week (UK) in 2017, and in 2011 was placed on Time Magazine's top 100 non-fiction books written in English since 1923. Reissued with a fresh Introduction by the Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman and a new Afterword by Keynes’ biographer Robert Skidelsky, this important work is made available to a new generation. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money transformed economics and changed the face of modern macroeconomics. Keynes’ argument is based on the idea that the level of employment is not determined by the price of labour, but by the spending of money. It gave way to an entirely new approach where employment, inflation and the market economy are concerned. Highly provocative at its time of publication, this book and Keynes’ theories continue to remain the subject of much support and praise, criticism and debate. Economists at any stage in their career will enjoy revisiting this treatise and observing the relevance of Keynes’ work in today’s contemporary climate.

Economists as diverse in approach as Lord Keynes and Milton Friedman have analyzed the causes of the Great Depression, and their answers have ranged from underconsumption to failings in monetary policy. In Part 1 of The Great Depression, Christian Saint-Etienne compares these theories with economic statistics for the interwar period and adds a further explanation: a collapse in international trade initiated by the Hawley-Smoot Tariff in the United States. Part 2 studies the economic history of the 1970s and the early 1980s to assess the likelhood of a depression in the 1980s. Among the author's recommendations for preventing a recurrence are free trade, reform of the international banking system, and coordination of the monetary policies of the major industrial nations.