All Posts Tagged With: "Keynesianism"
Keynesianism Doesn’t Mean Bigger Government?
The debate over what John Maynard Keynes “really” meant by the theories he put forward in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money has been going on almost since it was published in 1936. The release of the second Hayek-Keynes hip-hop video brought this debate back to a boil. For example, in a May [...]
30Nov2011 | Steven Horwitz | 4 comments | ContinuedMore Government Action Needed for Job Recovery?
Would it come as a shock to hear one of the best-known apologists for government intervention in the economy admitting that it hasn’t worked (so far)? This is exactly what Nobel Prize-winning economist and uber-Keynesian Paul Krugman does in a New York Times column, stating, “[W]e are not now and have never been on the [...]
26Oct2011 | Tyler Watts | 1 comment | ContinuedPrivate Investment and Public “Investment”
Politicians are fond of telling the public that we must “invest” in this program or that—be it education; health care; make-work infrastructure projects like the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere”; $50 million for an indoor rainforest in Iowa; $3.4 million for a tunnel to allow turtles to cross under a highway in Florida; $1.8 million for swine [...]
22Jun2011 | Adam B. Summers | 1 comment | ContinuedHow an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes
Ignorance of economics is rampant. The average person believes the secret to prosperity is consumption and was often led to that fallacy by professional economists who should know better. Economic education in the universities has been as much a part of the problem as the solution, with millions of students taught Keynesian beliefs about government [...]
22Jun2011 | Robert Batemarco | 4 comments | ContinuedEconomic Analysis and the Great Society
Although the Great Society should be understood as primarily a political phenomenon—a vast conglomeration of government policies and actions based on political stances and objectives—economists and economic analysis played important supporting roles in the overall drama. Even when political actors could not have cared less about economic analysis, they were usually at pains to cloak [...]
25May2011 | Robert Higgs | 5 comments | ContinuedNaive Keynesianism: A Failure of Imagination
Each of us has a set of peeves—things that disproportionately irritate us. By their nature, most peeves are small. For example, I bristle at the failure to use hyphens correctly. As my late, great teacher Fritz Machlup pointed out, a foreign exchange student is typically not a foreign-exchange student. The first is a student studying [...]
21Apr2011 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 8 comments | ContinuedThe Canard of “Underutilized Resources”
Last November the Federal Open Market Committee announced plans to purchase, by printing money, $600 billion of long-term government bonds over the next 6 months. This “quantitative easing,” Fed Chairman Bernanke assures us, is necessary to aid an economy that is suffering from “a very high level of underutilization of resources.” In other words, there’s [...]
24Feb2011 | Tyler Watts | 1 comment | ContinuedAnd the Slump Goes On
Official economic statistics and the underlying economic reality sometimes differ starkly. Such discrepancies may be almost inevitable when a small group of macroeconomic experts sets the official dates for peaks and troughs of aggregate economic activity. The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) recently “determined that a trough in [...]
24Feb2011 | Angel Martín Oro | 13 comments | ContinuedWar Would End the Recession?
In his September 28 New York Times blog post, Paul Krugman announced that “economics is not a morality play.” That turn of phrase is his way of defending the idea that in unusual times, such as the sort of deep recession we are in, we can get strange relationships between economic cause and effect. The result [...]
22Dec2010 | Steven Horwitz | 41 comments | ContinuedPresidential Hubris
If we were going to spend $700 billion, it seems it would be wiser having that $700 billion going to folks who would spend that money right away. In October Barack Obama said this in defense of his opposition to extending the 2001 and 2003 tax-rate reductions for people making more than $200,000 a year. [...]
22Dec2010 | Sheldon Richman | 4 comments | ContinuedConsumerism Is Keynesianism
One of the most pernicious and widespread economic fallacies is the belief that consumption is the key to a healthy economy.
9Dec2010 | Steven Horwitz | 81 comments | ContinuedDoes Saving Reduce GDP?
Warren C. Gibson’s article, “GDP: Who Needs It?” in the May 2010 edition of the Freeman, asserts an inconsistency. He correctly denigrates the Keynesian notion of promoting consumption spending as a means of promoting GDP growth: “The predominance of consumption seems to have spawned the bizarre notion that if we can only get consumer spending [...]
24Nov2010 | and James C. W. Ahiakpor | 2 comments | ContinuedPaying the Unemployed Does Not Stimulate an Economy
Many in Congress as well as the President and some of his economic advisers have argued that extending the period for paying the unemployed will stimulate the U.S. economy out of its sluggish performance. Would any of them consider as valid an argument that giving money out of their own pockets to an unemployed member [...]
24Nov2010 | James C. W. Ahiakpor | 17 comments | ContinuedMore Income Redistribution Will End the Great Recession?
With increasingly widespread recognition of the failure of Keynesian economic policies, all the Progressives are left with are claims whose acceptance requires a suspension of one’s logical faculties. An excellent example of this is a September 2, 2010, New York Times op-ed by Robert Reich, the Clinton administration secretary of labor and professor of public [...]
24Nov2010 | Ivan Pongracic Jr. | 4 comments | ContinuedConsumer Spending Drives the Economy?
Consumer spending makes up more than 70 percent of the economy, and it usually drives growth during economic recoveries.” —“Consumers Give Boost to Economy,” New York Times, May 1 Every quarter, when the government releases its latest GDP figures, we hear the familiar refrain: “What the consumer does is vital for economic growth.” “If the [...]
22Sep2010 | Mark Skousen | 26 comments | ContinuedEconomy Loses Jobs
The government discharged the temporary census workers, and the economy lost a net 125,000 jobs last month. The unemployment rate dropped to 9.5 percent — because discouraged people left the work force. The Keynesian strategy for recovery is a rousing success.
2Jul2010 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | ContinuedWhatever Happened to Thrift? Why Americans Don’t Save and What to Do about It
Keynesianism is back in vogue, and prominent economists are dusting off their discussions of the “paradox of thrift.” So amid the apologies for bigger government deficits, it is refreshing to read Ronald Wilcox’s Whatever Happened to Thrift? For those interested in the subject of saving, this volume is a good read. Too often when I [...]
29Jun2010 | Robert P. Murphy | 0 comments | Continued-
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