Daily Archives: October 9, 2013

I Have Seen the Next Big Thing, and it is Mariana Mazzucato

By Dan Kervick

I take time out from our latest national celebration of curmudgeonly misery and political decadence, which features an intense bipartisan struggle over whether to cling to liberal or conservative forms of long-term economic stagnation, in order call the reader’s attention to an economist whose innovative ideas are so insightful, so well-informed and so right that they stand in terrifying contrast to almost everything that most Americans in 2013 hold dear.

The economist is Mariana Mazzucato of the University of Sussex, who recently presented several of the leading ideas from her new book, The Entrepreneurial State, to an audience at the London School of Economics. Mazzucato ties a vast number of themes together in a sparkling, rapid-fire talk followed by a stimulating round of Q&A. Among the economists who come in for discussion along the way are Polanyi, Keynes, Schumpeter, Stiglitz and Krugman. Mazzucato pulls no punches on the inadequacies of bastard Keynesianism with its limited emphasis on economic pump-priming, and on the dead-enders of neoliberal thought represented, for example, by the editorial staff of The Economist magazine. Here is the link to the presentation:

Mazzucato at the LSE

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Stephanie Kelton’s Appearance on All In with Chris Hayes

NEP’s Stephanie Kelton appeared on Chris Hayes’ All In on Monday evening, (10/8/13). The topic of discussion was “Why the debt ceiling isn’t your family budget” examining the fallacy of comparing the debt ceiling to a family budget.

See the full show here.

UPI Treats Monetary Fiction as Fact: Sows the Seeds of the GOP’s Efforts to Cause a Recession

By William K. Black

In the course of researching yesterday’s column that explains why Tyler Cowen’s faux “hyper-meritocracy” endangers our world I read a number of articles discussing the Northwestern University study on the public policy views of the wealthy.  One of those columns was published by UPI on February 24, 2013.

One of the central points that the scholars who conducted the study made was that the wealthy use their political clout to try to cause the American public to adopt the belief of the wealthy that reducing the federal budget deficit, in response to the Great Recession, was the most important problem facing America.  In my column yesterday I noted that the scholars pointed out the logical incoherence of that position given the wealthy’s strong support for the policy view that the federal government should run budget deficits as a counter-cyclical fiscal policy to a recession.

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