|
on Post Keynesian Economics |
| By: | L. Randall Wray |
| Abstract: | This working paper examines the legacy of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the publication of Keynes’s masterpiece and the 60th anniversary of his death. The paper incorporates some of the latest research by prominent followers of Keynes, presented at the 9th International Post Keynesian Conference in September 2006, and integrates this with other work that has come out of the Keynesian tradition since the 1940s. It is argued that Keynes’s contributions still provide important guidance for real-world policy formation. |
| Date: | 2007–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lev:wrkpap:wp_514&r=pke |
| By: | L. Randall Wray |
| Abstract: | While Hyman P. Minsky is best known for his work on financial instability, he was also intimately involved in the postwar debates about fiscal policy and what would become the War on Poverty. Indeed, at the University of California, Berkeley, he was a vehement critic of the policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and played a major role in developing an alternative. Minsky insisted that the high investment path chosen by postwar fine-tuners would generate macroeconomic instability, and that the War on Poverty would never lower poverty rates significantly. In retrospect, he was correct on both accounts. Further, he proposed high consumption and an employer of last resort policy as essential ingredients of any coherent strategy for achieving macro stability and poverty elimination. This paper summarizes Minsky’s work in this area, focusing on his writings from the early 1960s through the early 1970s in order to explore the path not taken. |
| Date: | 2007–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lev:wrkpap:wp_515&r=pke |
| By: | Manuel Couret Branco (Department of Economics, University of Évora) |
| Abstract: | It is said that economics value individual and economic freedom and from that many hastily conclude that mainstream economics value human rights. The purpose of this paper is to show that on the contrary mainstream economics is fundamentally contradictory with many human rights especially Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The main reason for this is that mainstream economics and human rights have trouble in communicating, the latter speaking the rights language and the former the needs language. Within the needs language, capability to pay is the key question whereas within the rights language, entitlement is. If in the first case exclusion and inequality are acceptable in the second case the only acceptable situation is the one characterized by inclusion and equality. In other words goods and services can be unequally distributed, rights cannot. For this reason one cannot count on the market alone to ensure economic, social and cultural rights. Therefore, considering the introduction of different logics into the economic equation as unbearable interferences with economic logic, mainstream economics stands against human rights. In order to give a better illustration of this contradiction the particular conflicts between economics and the right to work, the right to water and the right to social security will be presented. The main conclusion of this paper is that in order to favour human rights economics should either suffer a paradigmatic revolution or accept to play just a supporting role in the process of global development. |
| Keywords: | Human Rights, Economic Theory, Social Utility, Rights-Approach, Right to Work, Social Security |
| JEL: | A1 B4 H4 H5 I3 J8 K0 |
| Date: | 2007 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:evo:wpecon:02_2007&r=pke |
| By: | Kerwin Kofi Charles; Erik Hurst; Nikolai Roussanov |
| Abstract: | Using nationally representative data on consumption, we show that Blacks and Hispanics devote larger shares of their expenditure bundles to visible goods (clothing, jewelry, and cars) than do comparable Whites. We demonstrate that these differences exist among virtually all sub-populations, that they are relatively constant over time, and that they are economically large. While racial differences in utility preference parameters might account for a portion of these consumption differences, we emphasize instead a model of status seeking in which conspicuous consumption is used to reflect a household's economic position relative to a reference group. Using merged data on race and state level income, we demonstrate that a key prediction of our model -- that visible consumption should be declining in mean reference group income -- is strongly borne out in the data separately for each racial group. Moreover, we show that accounting for differences in reference group income characteristics explains most of the racial difference in visible consumption. We conclude with an assessment of the role of conspicuous consumption in explaining lower spending by racial minorities on items likes health and education, as well as their lower rates of wealth accumulation. |
| JEL: | D12 D83 D91 J15 |
| Date: | 2007–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13392&r=pke |