Stephen A. Marglin

Maynard M. Hufschmidt

Robert Dorfman

Arthur Maass

Jr. Harold A. Thomas

Gordon Maskew Fair

New Techniques for Relating Economic Objectives, Engineering Analysis, and Governmental Planning

Design of Water-Resource Systems

Back to the future: a heterodox economist rewrites Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money to serve as the basis for a macroeconomics for the twenty-first century. John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money was the most influential economic idea of the twentieth century. But, argues Stephen Marglin, its radical implications were obscured by Keynes’s lack of the mathematical tools necessary to argue convincingly that the problem was the market itself, as distinct from myriad sources of friction around its margins. Marglin fills in the theoretical gaps, revealing the deeper meaning of the General Theory. Drawing on eight decades of discussion and debate since the General Theory was published, as well as on his own research, Marglin substantiates Keynes’s intuition that there is no mechanism within a capitalist economy that ensures full employment. Even if deregulating the economy could make it more like the textbook ideal of perfect competition, this would not address the problem that Keynes identified: the potential inadequacy of aggregate demand. Ordinary citizens have paid a steep price for the distortion of Keynes’s message. Fiscal policy has been relegated to emergencies like the Great Recession. Monetary policy has focused unduly on inflation. In both cases the underlying rationale is the false premise that in the long run at least the economy is self-regulating so that fiscal policy is unnecessary and inflation beyond a modest 2 percent serves no useful purpose. Fleshing out Keynes’s intuition that the problem is not the warts on the body of capitalism but capitalism itself, Raising Keynes provides the foundation for a twenty-first-century macroeconomics that can both respond to crises and guide long-run policy.

A Twenty-First-Century General Theory

Raising Keynes

Frédérique Apffel Marglin

This book addresses the role of knowledge in economic development and in resistance to development. It questions the conventional view that development is the application of superior knowledge to the problems of poor countries, and that resistance to development comes out of ignorance and superstition. It argues instead that the basis of resistance is the fear that the material benefits of Western technologies can be enjoyed only at the price of giving up indigenous ways of knowing and valuing the world, an idea fostered as much by present-day elites, who have internalized colonial elites who ruled before them. A prerequisite to decoupling Western technologies from these political entailments is to understand the conflict between different ways of knowing and valuing the world. This book differs from previous critiques of development because it addresses neither the strategy nor the tactics of development, but the very conception itself. Its focus is on knowledge and power in the development process. The book argues that `modern' knowledge wins out in the conflict with `traditional' knowledge not because of its superior cognitive power, but because of its prestige, associated both with the economic and political ascendancy of the West over the past 500 years and with the cultural history of the West itself.

Development, Culture, and Resistance

Dominating Knowledge

See "Stephen Marglin on the Future of Capitalism" at FORA.tv. Economists celebrate the market as a device for regulating human interaction without acknowledging that their enthusiasm depends on a set of half-truths: that individuals are autonomous, self-interested, and rational calculators with unlimited wants and that the only community that matters is the nation-state. However, as Stephen Marglin argues, market relationships erode community. In the past, for example, when a farm family experienced a setback--say the barn burned down--neighbors pitched in. Now a farmer whose barn burns down turns, not to his neighbors, but to his insurance company. Insurance may be a more efficient way to organize resources than a community barn raising, but the deep social and human ties that are constitutive of community are weakened by the shift from reciprocity to market relations. Marglin dissects the ways in which the foundational assumptions of economics justify a world in which individuals are isolated from one another and social connections are impoverished as people define themselves in terms of how much they can afford to consume. Over the last four centuries, this economic ideology has become the dominant ideology in much of the world. Marglin presents an account of how this happened and an argument for righting the imbalance in our lives that this ideology has fostered.

How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community

The Dismal Science

Juliet B. Schor

For some twenty years after the Second World War, Keynesian economic policies in countries of the capitalist West were successful in generating rapid growth with high employment. This `golden age of capitalism' did not survive the economic traumas of the 1970s; nor has the more recent emphasison monetarist policies and supply-side performance succeeded in regenerating comparable growth rates. Blending historical analysis with economic theory, this book seeks to understand the making and unmaking of this `golden age', questions the basis of much present policy-making, and suggestsalternative directions for policy.

Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience

The Golden Age of Capitalism

Stephen A. Marglin

Books

Your next favorite book is out there