Barkley Rosser at “Economists View”:
“I made up the moniker “Bielefeld School” in the Foreword to that book. I labeled it a variety of Post Keynesian approaches, although noting that some of those involved did not like this label as they think of most Post Keynesians as being insufficiently mathematical. In any case, their approach involves explicitly modeling the financial sector along with the production sector and their interrelated nonlinear fluctuations.”

Reply:

“This is, besides mine, the first mention of Flaschel and Chiarella I have seen in the blogosphere.

http://www.amazon.com/Macrodynamics-Capitalism-Elements-Synthesis-Schumpeter/dp/3540879315/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259344510&sr=1-1

is the one I read. I am a fan, without probably understanding a word. Ok, maybe a word.”

As for restoring the “rights” of labor and more equitable distributions of output/income/opportunity-structures, I would be the last person to decry any increase in unionization. However, there’s no use in being nostalgic, and technological change/automation, as well as, “free trade”, have eroded the rents or quasi-rents that underlay the mass-production/high wage economy, or at least, significantly restructured them and their distributions. It’s likely more public/state-regulated policies would be required to restore an more salutary,- and demand enhancing,- “balance”. (As a slightly irrelevant example, since it is a small homogeneous country, the co-ordinationist policy formation of Finland, by which it emerged from its depression at the beginning of the 1990’s).

It’s bootless to pretend that economics/economy concerns some singular, unified system, independent of its agents, (who are more likely organizations than individuals), such that the sole concerns is “stabilizing” that system, with otherwise self-stabilizing, self-regulating properties. There are a number of functionally equivalent “solutions” to any problem that such systems might confront, in part or as a whole, with no uniquely “correct” solution, but different functional and distributive effects. (For example, reducing household debt burdens, ignoring the legalistic and administrative obstacles presented by “securitization” of debts, would have similar monetary stimulus effects to the Fed’s monetary lollapalooza,- which continues the U.S. $ kiting scheme,- but with different distributional and functional effects). It’s not just that any economy qua system is dynamic and “non-ergodic”, which escape GE analytic frameworks, but that such issues and the way fundamental “choices” are made is more a matter of political-economy than “pure” economics.

But then, to return to the “full employment” problem, economists don’t exactly know what conditions underlying productivity growth, since much depends on the as yet untapped availability of technical possibilities, which they don’t exactly have a handle on. And, er, their distributional effects, since that already effects investment incentives. But clearly, the presence of sensed effective demand, (which moderate inflation signals, since, not only does it motivate renewed investment, but it reduces the credit risk of sunk costs), is tied to the pressure of wage-based demand, as both the factor in sensed demand and as a pressure on investment, to reduce labor-cost. Hence the policy of fighting inflation at all costs results in a reduction of the pressure for investment/innovation. And the over-valorization of existent capital stocks. Especially if re-distributive mechanisms on gains in the surplus-product are “eased”. Which is why “stagflation” is such a canard, since it is really a matter of maintaining the valorization of capital through maintaining its rate-of-profit. In general, I see no way of distinguishing, in neo-classical economics, between increases in profit due to investment in technical improvements in real capital stocks, which thereby increase labor-productivity and lower unit output costs, thus increasing, actually and potentially, the real distributable surplus product, social “wealth”, and increases in the rate-of-profit, due to changes in distribution between wages and profits. But then there is something of a paradox that increases in real social “wealth” might lessen the need to exploit labor, and therefore lessen the exigency of the interests of capital. In other words, the focus on “stagflation” was overdetermined by interests beyond the problem at hand, and the various functional “solutions” to that problem gave rise to the “globalized” over-financialization and the generation of fictitious capital that has broken down in the GFC nowadays. Because of the dogma that the private market will always allocate capital investment efficiently, better than any other possible mechanism, and thereby “guarantee” a social welfare optimum. Which dogma is being refuted “empirically” before our very eyes today. Which is to say, that any salutary exit and recovery from the global crisis might needs involve both a transformation in the current global FX/trade regime, and a much greater role for public investment and regulation, (with expanded social insurance and re-distribution schemes), than mere patches on macro-economic models would allow for.

Finally, the invocation of “utopianism” against any more-than-incremental change is also a befuddled canard. TINA! The kind of incremental liberal progressive meliorism that glides over past pains and struggles, as if collecting the rent, and arbitrarily extrapolates such progress “linearly” into the future-reduced-to-the-present, such that it can’t tell the difference between any “authentic” progress or genuine reform, and social regression and the dismantling of achieved collective gains, because the disruptive “nature” of historical change is most of all to be feared, is, er, passe’. And complicit in current structure of domination. (It tends to result in the sort of slip-shod historical imagining that 1917 and Putin belong to the same historical horizon, apparently constituted by some transcendental Uebermensch,- “leaping tall buildings in a single bound”,- such that the imposition of “shock therapy”, inspite of the absence of any institutional structures to handle it, would be the adequate “resolution” to the Cold War, as opposed to any more gradual process of re-organization and nuclear disarmament, resulting in a chaotic mafia-capitalism, which looted and exported any residual value to painfully accumulated capital stocks, such that the well-nigh inevitable succession of a Chekist-capitalism, to “normalize” the situation, is an outcome to be devoutly condemned!). Nope. The consideration of alternative pathways, multiplely, need to be considered, which the rote condemnation of “utopianism” and “apocalypticism”, as a consideration of the relation between proximate and “ultimate” ends, obfuscates. “History” always contains more possibilities than are actualized in and as history, which is, er what makes it at all history. Constructing some singular unitary systemic theory to “contain” such possibility in the name of its artifactual “necessity” is a fool’s errand. Call it “economics” or what you will. It’s already to lay a claim in the “game” of power.

Huh? Where did I say anything even resembling that? (Actually I had in mind eg. the US v. Germany.)

I enjoyed college a lot more, but I did not feel independent. Others may differ I suppose.

You suppose right.

My current draft of the book at zombiecon.wikidot.com is not quite up to date, but gives a better view of the book as a whole than this one section.

As for the factory worker versus the dependent student, yes, I think so. I felt more independent when I was working sh*t jobs than when I was a student, and I was only getting minor parental support (considerable state support, though). I enjoyed college a lot more, but I did not feel independent. Others may differ I suppose. But you’re trying to pick a huge fight over an offhand comment that I didn’t think earlier entry to the workforce was necessarily a bad thing, in part because of the increased sense of independence it typically brings in a first world context in my opinions. If you disagree with that, fine, but it’s off-topic here, and arguments like “does a sex slave in Mexico feel more independent than someone on welfare in the US” are just silly. It’s an explicit apples-to-oranges comparison. And, in any case, this is all off-topic, which means I’ve been led into expending more time on it than I probably should have anyway.

John, well, your choice, but I don’t think you’ve made the case.

But on the other thing: living in a country where higher education is cheap (but still not cheap enough) it is clear that cheap isn’t good enough. On returning students: hell, yes!

(I’m not talking about forced early retirement & also I’m only talking about formalized employment)

PS: I think much can be said for earlier entry I think; 1-2 years to make sure there is an independence sufficient to choose according to real talent (& not based on perceptions of parents largely influenced by what happens to be hot on the labour market)