Aggregate Demand and Employment

Reviews / Votes

'This volume features an all-star cast of some of the world's leading heterodox economists, evaluating the state of economics a decade after the global financial crisis, and identifying promising directions for a more realistic and humane approach to both theory and policy. The key lessons of this troubled time are still denied by orthodoxy: namely, that aggregate demand is predominant, and knee-jerk austerity only exacerbates the failures of deregulated, financialized capitalism. Combining careful empirical evidence with thoughtful criticism, these essays locate important chinks in the armour of conventional doctrine, and lead us toward better approaches. It's a powerful, and ultimately hopeful, collection.'
--Jim Stanford, Centre for Future Work, Australia'A challenging set of essays indeed. ''High ... aggregate demand is ... essential ... to full employment and rising living standards.'' There is a negative relationship between unemployment and growth, and a positive one between growth and real wages. But, how to square this with fashionable views about the limits to growth?'
--John Smithin, York University, Canada

'. . . this book assembles essays by distinguished economists in the Keynesian and Post Keynesian traditions, offering a unified analytical framework for the recent economic experiences of large parts of the world. . . These essays therefore pose important questions, beginning with the most central: given that the crisis did occur, would a more progressive, more expansionary, more Keynesian policy have produced a faster recovery and a better long-term condition? This question can, in effect, be taken as a template for the entire book, which explores the potential consequences of better policies in a range of settings, some related directly to the Great Financial Crisis and others bound to it not so much directly, as by the pervasive application of mainstream policies to analogous situations.'
--from the Foreword by James K. Galbraith