Authors
Engelbert Stockhammer, Özlem Onaran
Publication date
2022
Book
Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation
Pages
53-73
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Description
The global financial crisis and the following period of “secular stagnation” have raised questions about the state of modern economics and macroeconomics in particular. This has had repercussions for social sciences that deal with economic issues. In particular, in the fields of International Political Economy (IPE) and Comparative Political Economy (CPE), there is rising interest in non-mainstream macroeconomic theories (Blyth and Matthijs 2017; Baccaro and Pontussen 2016). In CPE there is a recognition that the field has in the past decades increasingly shifted to institutional and microeconomic questions and disregarded Keynesian considerations of macroeconomic instability and problems of fallacies of composition (Schwartz and Tranoy 2019). The purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of post-Keynesian economics (PKE) as a non-mainstream macroeconomic theory. PKE is the radical wing of Keynesian theory; it builds on, but also goes beyond Keynes. PKE rejects methodological individualism and is based on the notion of fundamental uncertainty and conventional behavior. It highlights the role of institutions and class in determining economic outcomes. At the core of PKE is the assertion that growth is demand-led. The market mechanism in a recession is generally unable to establish full employment as wage cuts tend to dampen consumption and thus aggregate demand. Thus involuntary unemployment is the norm rather than exception. The financial sector is regarded as a source of flexibility as well as instability. Money is created endogenously as an outcome of banks’ lending decisions. Credit can be used for different …
Total citations
202220232024274
Scholar articles
E Stockhammer, Ö Onaran - Diminishing returns: The new politics of growth and …, 2022