Category Archives: Economic History

Monetarism is a hoary old myth that does its damage in two distinct ways. The first is that, piggybacking on Milton Friedman’s personality, basically an entire generation of economists are actually monetarist in their practical thinking. Greg Mankiw once remarked … Continue reading →

Tom Palley has written a blog post politely requesting that Paul Krugman might give a bit of recognition to non-mainstream contributors to economics. It would be nice to see this happen but I doubt that it will (although Palley is … Continue reading →

A recent post by Lord Keynes inspired me to write up some very general thoughts on the state of mainstream economics. Today, I believe, mainstream economics is completely incoherent. What do I mean by that? Well, basically if you are … Continue reading →

Marginalist economic theory tells us that when there is unemployment of capital resources prices should fall. Some marginalists like the New Keynesians and the neo-Keynesians will supplement this by saying that prices can tend to be ‘sticky’. Let us ignore … Continue reading →

Endogenous money advocates often think that a central bank is required in order to offset increases in government borrowing. The story goes: the central bank targets the overnight interest rate by buying up government securities; if the government issues more … Continue reading →

Yesterday and today in the comments section to my blog there was a somewhat interesting discussion about hoarding and unemployment. One commenter claimed that hoarding only caused unemployment in a monetary economy. I have heard this a lot, but I … Continue reading →