Macro Economic Thinking And The Market Economy

Revised Ger. translation published in 1975 under title: Makroökonomischer Formalismus und die Marktwirtschaft. Bibliography: p. 55-56.

If you are genuinely interested in what is wrong with modern economics, this is where you can find out. If you would like to understand the flaws in Keynesian macro, this is the book you must read. If you are interested in marginal analysis properly explained, you again need to read this book. Based on the classical principles of John Stuart Mill, it is what is missing today; a text based on explaining how an economy works from a supply-side perspective.

This innovative book focuses on the current global financial crisis and the inadequacies of the economic theories being used to guide policy. In so doing, it tackles the economic theories that have been used firstly to understand its causes and thereafter to contain the damage it has brought.

Macroeconomics is the application of economic theory to the study of the economy’s growth, cycle and price-level determination. Macroeconomics takes account of stylized facts observed in the real world and builds theoretical frameworks to explain such facts. Economic growth is a stylized fact of market economies, since England’s nineteenth-century industrial revolution. Until then, poverty was a common good for humanity. Economic growth consists in the persistent, smooth and sustained increase of per-capita income. A market economy shows periods of expanding and contracting economic activity. This phenomenon is the economic cycle. The price of money is the amount of goods bought with one unit of money, in other words, the inverse of the price level. Determination of the price level, or the value of money, is a fascinating subject in a fiat money economy.

The financial instability and its spillover to the real sector have become a great challenge to macro-economic theory. The book takes a Keynesian theoretical perspective, representing an attempt to revive what Keynes stressed in his General Theory, namely the role of the financial market in macroeconomic outcomes. Although this book is inspired and motivated by the Asian currency and financial crises in the years 1997-8 and the experiences of the currently evolving U.S. financial disruptions, it also focuses on reviving a modeling tradition that provides a theoretical framework that throws light on recent financial market episodes and disturbances and their macroeconomic effects. It brings to the forefront, as Keynes has suggested, the role of financial market stability for growth and macroeconomics. It criticizes theories that see economic disruptions and shocks rooted solely in the real side of the economy. It stresses the financial real interaction as the major source for macroeconomic instability and disruptions. This important new book from a group of Keynesian, but nonetheless technically oriented economists would be of most interest to specialists and graduate students in macroeconomics and financial economics, especially those with an interest in US and European financial markets, emerging market analysis, and dynamic economic modeling.

In the past, Austrian economics has been seen as almost exclusively focused on microeconomics. Here,Steven Horwitz constructs a systematic presentation of what Austrian macroeconomics would look like. This original and highly accessible work will be of great value and interest to professional economists and students.