Reconstructing Macroeconomics

Macroeconomics is in disarray. No one approach is dominant, and an increasing divide between theory and empirics is evident. This book presents both a critique of mainstream macroeconomics from a structuralist perspective and an exposition of modern structuralist approaches. The fundamental assumption of structuralism is that it is impossible to understand a macroeconomy without understanding its major institutions and distributive relationships across productive sectors and social groups. Lance Taylor focuses his critique on mainstream monetarist, new classical, new Keynesian, and growth models. He examines them from a historical perspective, tracing monetarism from its eighteenth-century roots and comparing current monetarist and new classical models with those of the post-Wicksellian, pre-Keynesian generation of macroeconomists. He contrasts the new Keynesian vision with Keynes's General Theory, and analyzes contemporary growth theories against long traditions of thought about economic development and structural change. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Social Accounts and Social Relations 1. A Simple Social Accounting Matrix 2. Implications of the Accounts 3. Disaggregating Effective Demand 4. A More Realistic SAM 5. Stock-Flow Relationships 6. A SAM and Asset Accounts for the United States 7. Further Thoughts 2. Prices and Distribution 1. Classical Macroeconomics 2. Classical Theories of Price and Distribution 3. Neoclassical Cost-Based Prices 4. Hat Calculus, Measuring Productivity Growth, and Full Employment Equilibrium 5. Mark-up Pricing in the Product Market 6. Efficiency Wages for Labor 7. New Keynesian Crosses and Methodological Reservations 8. First Looks at Inflation 3. Money, Interest, and Inflation 1. Money and Credit 2. Diverse Interest Theories 3. Interest Rate Cost-Push 4. Real Interest Rate Theory 5. The Ramsey Model 6. Dynamics on a Flying Trapeze 7. The Overlapping Generations Growth Model 8. Wicksell's Cumulative Process Inflation Model 9. More on Inflation Taxes 4. Effective Demand and Its Real and Financial Implications 1. The Commodity Market 2. Macro Adjustment via Forced Saving and Real Balance Effects 3. Real Balances, Input Substitution, and Money Wage Cuts 4. Liquidity Preference and Marginal Efficiency of Capital 5. Liquidity Preference, Fisher Arbitrage, and the Liquidity Trap 6. The System as a Whole 7. The IS/LM Model 8. Keynes and Friends on Financial Markets 9. Financial Markets and Investment 10. Consumption and Saving 11 "Disequilibrium" Macroeconomics 12. A Structuralist Synopsis 5. Short-Term Model Closure and Long-Term Growth 1. Model "Closures" in the Short Run 2. Graphical Representations and Supply-Driven Growth 3. Harrod, Robinson, and Related Stories 4. More Stable Demand-Determined Growth 6. Chicago Monetarism, New Classical Macroeconomics, and Mainstream Finance 1. Methodological Caveats 2. A Chicago Monetarist Model 3. A Cleaner Version of Monetarism 4. New Classical Spins 5. Dynamics of Government Debt 6. Ricardian Equivalence 7. The Business Cycle Conundrum 8. Cycles from the Supply Side 9. Optimal Behavior under Risk 10. Random Walk, Equity Premium, and the Modigliani-Miller Theorem 11. More on Modigliani-Miller 12. The Calculation Debate and Super-Rational Economics 7. Effective Demand and the Distributive Curve 1. Initial Observations 2. Inflation, Productivity Growth, and Distribution 3. Absorbing Productivity Growth 4. Effects of Expansionary Policy 5. Financial Extensions 6. Dynamics of the System 7. Comparative Dynamics 8. Open Economy Complications 8. Structuralist Finance and Money 1. Banking History and Institutions 2. Endogenous Finance 3. Endogenous Money via Bank Lending 4. Money Market Funds and the Level of Interest Rates 5. Business Debt and Growth in a Post-Keynesian World 6. New Keynesian Approaches to Financial Markets 9. A Genus of Cycles 1. Goodwin's Model 2. A Structuralist Goodwin Model 3. Evidence for the United States 4. A Contractionary Devaluation Cycle 5. An Inflation Expectations Cycle 6. Confidence and Multiplier 7. Minsky on Financial Cycles 8. Excess Capacity, Corporate Debt Burden, and a Cold Douche 9. Final Thoughts 10. Exchange Rate Complications 1. Accounting Conundrums 2. Determining Exchange Rates 3. Asset Prices, Expectations, and Exchange Rates 4. Commodity Arbitrage and Purchasing Power Parity 5. Portfolio Balance 6. Mundell-Fleming 7. IS/LM Comparative Statics 8. UIP and Dynamics 9. Open Economy Monetarism 10. Dornbusch 11. Other Theories of the Exchange Rate 12. A Developing Country Debt Cycle 13. Fencing in the Beast 11. Growth and Development Theories 1. New Growth Theories and Say's Law 2. Distribution and Growth 3. Models with Binding Resource or Sectoral Supply Constraints 4. Accounting for Growth 5. Other Perspectives 6. The Mainstream Policy Response 7. Where Theory Might Sensibly Go References Index Reconstructing Macroeconomics is a stunning intellectual achievement. It surveys an astonishing range of macroeconomic problems and approaches in a compact, coherent critical framework with unfailing depth, wit, and subtlety. Lance Taylor's pathbreaking work in structural macroeconomics and econometrics sets challenging standards of rigor, realism, and insight for the field. Taylor shows why the structuralist and Keynesian insistence on putting accounting consistency, income distribution, and aggregate demand at the center of macroeconomic analysis is indispensable to understanding real-world macroeconomic events in both developing and developed economies. The book is full of new results, modeling techniques, and shrewd suggestions for further research. Taylor's scrupulous and balanced appraisal of the whole range of macroeconomic schools of thought will be a source of new perspectives to macroeconomists of every persuasion. --Duncan K. Foley, New School University Lance Taylor has produced a masterful and comprehensive critical survey of existing macro models, both mainstream and structuralist, which breaks considerable new ground. The pace is brisk, the level is high, and the writing is entertaining. The author's sense of humor and literary references enliven the discussion of otherwise arcane and technical, but extremely important, issues in macro theory. This book is sure to become a standard reference that future generations of macroeconomists will refer to for decades to come. --Robert Blecker, American University While there are other books dealing with heterodox macroeconomics, this book surpasses them all in the quality of its presentation and in the careful treatment and criticism of orthodox macroeconomics including its recent contributions. The book is unique in the way it systematically covers heterodox growth theory and its relations to other aspects of heterodox macroeconomics using a common organizing framework in terms of accounting relations, and in the way it compares the theories with mainstream contributions. Another positive and novel feature of the book is that it takes a long view of the development of economic ideas, which leads to a more accurate appreciation of the real contributions by recent theoretical developments than is possible in a presentation that ignores the history of macroeconomics. --Amitava Dutt, University of Notre Dame

In this book, the authors reconceptualize existing macroeconomics by treating equilibria as statistical distributions, not as fixed points.

This book represents the second of three volumes offering a complete reinterpretation and restructuring of Keynesian macroeconomics and a detailed investigation of the disequilibrium adjustment processes characterizing the financial, the goods and the labour markets and their interaction. In this second volume the authors present a detailed analysis and comparison of two competing types of approaches to Keynesian macroeconomics, one that integrates goods, labour and financial markets, and another from the perspective of a conventional type of LM-analysis or interest-rate policy of the central bank. The authors employ rigorous dynamic macro-models of a descriptive and applicable nature, which will be of interest to all macroeconomists who use formal model-building in their investigations. The research in this book with its focus on Keynesian propagation mechanisms provides a unique alternative to the black-box shock-absorber approaches that dominate modern macroeconomics. The main conclusion of the work is that policy makers need to reconsider Keynesian ideas, but in the modern form in which they are expressed in this volume. Reconstructing Keynesian Macroeconomics will be of interest to students and researchers who want to look at alternatives to the mainstream macrodynamics that emerged from the Monetarist critique of Keynesianism. This book will also engage central bankers and macroeconomic policy makers.

This groundbreaking new core textbook encourages students to take a more critical approach to the prevalent assumptions around the subject of macroeconomics, by comparing and contrasting heterodox and orthodox approaches to theory and policy. The first such textbook to develop a heterodox model from the ground up, it is based on the principles of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as derived from the theories of Keynes, Kalecki, Veblen, Marx, and Minsky, amongst others. The internationally-respected author team offer appropriate fiscal and monetary policy recommendations, explaining how the poor economic performance of most of the wealthy capitalist countries over recent decades could have been avoided, and delivering a well-reasoned practical and philosophical argument for the heterodox MMT approach being advocated. The book is suitable for both introductory and intermediate courses, offering a thorough overview of the basics and valuable historical context, while covering everything needed for more advanced courses. Issues are explained conceptually, with the more technical, mathematical material in chapter appendices, offering greater flexibility of use.

This book explains how standard micro-founded macroeconomics is misguided and proposes an alternative method based on statistical physics. The Great Recession following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2015 amply demonstrated that mainstream micro-founded macroeconomics was in trouble. The new approach advanced in this book reasonably explains important macro-problems such as employment, business cycles, growth, and inflation/deflation. The key concept is demand failures, which modern micro-founded macroeconomics has ignored. “It (Chapter 3) captures analytically a good part of the intuition that underlies the Keynesian economics of people like Tobin and me.” Robert Solow, Emeritus Institute Professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 1987 “Professor Hiroshi Yoshikawa provides a unique synthesis of statistical physics and macro-economic theory in order to confront the dismal failure in economics and in finance to understand how an economy or a financial market works, given the heterogeneous decision making of many different individual interacting actors. Economics has failed in this regard with the naive and often misleading concept of “representative agents.” The author presents many insights on the historical development, concepts, and errors made by the most illustrious economists in the past. This book should be essential readings for any economics students as well as academic researchers and policy makers, who should learn to bring back good-sense thinking in their impactful decisions.” Didier Sornette, Professor on the Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich)

This book represents the first of three volumes offering a complete reinterpretation and restructuring of Keynesian macroeconomics and a detailed investigation of the disequilibrium adjustment processes characterizing the financial, the goods and the labour markets and their interaction. It questions in a radical way the evolution of Keynesian macroeconomics after World War II and focuses on the limitations of the traditional Keynesian approach until it fell apart in the early 1970s, as well as the inadequacy of the new consensus in macroeconomics that emerged from the Monetarist critique of Keynesianism. Professors Chiarella, Flaschel and Semmler investigate basic methodological issues, the pitfalls of the Rational Expectations School, important feedback channels in the tradition of Tobin’s work, and theories of the wage-price spiral and the evidences for them. The book uses primarily partial approaches, the integration of which will be the subject of subsequent volumes. With its focus on Keynesian propagation mechanisms, the research in this book provides a unique alternative to the black-box shock-absorber approaches that dominate modern macroeconomics. Reconstructing Keynesian Macroeconomics should be of interest to students and researchers who want to look at alternatives to the mainstream macrodynamics that emerged from the Monetarist critique of Keynesianism.

This book represents the third of three volumes offering a complete reinterpretation and restructuring of Keynesian macroeconomics and a detailed investigation of the disequilibrium adjustment processes characterizing the financial, the goods and the labour markets and their interaction. This book offers a full treatment of the interlinkages between the real and the financial markets, including an analysis of banking, credit, and endogenous money and asset markets. It remains critical of quite frequently used conventional macro models that have dropped the tradition of studying the macroeconomic feedback channels, well-known in the history of macroeconomics. Those feedback mechanisms are known to have the potential for instabilities with respect to real markets, price dynamics and financial markets. In this volume a particular emphasis is given to the financial-real interaction. The research in this book with its focus on Keynesian propagation mechanisms provides a unique alternative to the black-box shock-absorber approaches that dominate modern macroeconomics. The main conclusion of the work is that policy makers need to reconsider Keynesian ideas, but in the modern form in which they are expressed in this volume. Reconstructing Keynesian Macroeconomics will be of interest to students and researchers who want to look at alternatives to the mainstream macrodynamics that emerged from the Monetarist critique of Keynesianism. This book will also engage central bankers and macroeconomic policy makers.