When Karl, Rosa, Michal and Maynard met in London

 Da Nakedkeynesianism

When Karl, Rosa, Michal and Maynard met in London[1]

Sergio Cesaratto

In a previous post I argued that if one wants to be convinced of the Classical and Sraffian surplus approach, she should read Jared Diamond. I would add now Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908) to the list. Although Jack London is a figure with some ambiguities, this book is prescient of the bellicose and authoritarian tendencies of capitalism. Orwell considered it an inspiration for 1984. The book sounds as a militant, didactic introduction to a Marxist interpretation of capitalism. In this capacity it uses the surplus approach, but not in its  Marxian version that employs the labour theory of value – pregnant of moralist meanings -, that Marx received from Ricardo’s Principles, but the more terse, so to speak, material version of Ricardo’s Essay on Profits. The social surplus, that in a capitalist society is appropriated by capitalists, appears as the difference between the amount of commodities produced and the amount of them paid to worker as wages (we are talking of a novel, so I feel free not to be extremely rigorous; the interested reader can consult Garegnani 1984).

Una nuova critica a Wray e all'MMT

Nakedkeynesianism ha pubblicato una mia nota critica (ma non ostile) a Wray e agli MMT (grazie Matias!). Nonostante essi ritengano di aver capito per primi la crisi europea, questo non è vero, sebbene ne abbiano capito prima di altri un elemento importante e di ciò gli va dato atto (ci mancherebbe). L'elemento è la rinuncia a una banca sovrana da parte degli stati nazionali. Il problema è che i toni che usano gli impediscono un dialogo sereno, non accorgendosi della parzialità delle loro tesi (a mio avviso, nel complesso, la crisi europea non l'hanno capita). In fondo v'è un po' di discussione (grazie Ramanan!).

(further, further discussion here and here)

Degli amici stanno procedendo alla traduzione in italiano.

The spurious victory of MMT

Sergio Cesaratto (Guest Blogger)

In a widely read blog aggregator Randy Wray has declared victory of MMT and that we are all MMTs by now. Victory on who? And I personally do not feel MMT, or better I feel MMT, Sraffian, Kaleckian, Marxist and many other things, each taken with a degree of salt. Fanaticism and over-excitement is not part of heterodox Economics, let alone of academic work, and the fact that Wray got so nervous after a initial critical comment by a reader is telling that we might be far away from a cool and equilibrate economic dialogue. MMT has provided a lot of important insights, as other approaches, about the European crisis. Also intellectual adversaries like Werner Sinn have contributed to our understanding of the crisis, in this case over the role of Target 2 (that for the first time or so Wray mentions). MMT has, indeed, missed the main feature of the EZ crisis: its nature of a balance of payment crisis. Anyway, I do not see the MMT explanation as alternative, but as complementary to the BoP crisis view. In this regard, more modesty would help everybody in our common scientific and political enterprise. While my own view of the EZ crisis as a BoP crisis is here (this WP is a longer version of an article in a book that will be published likely by Routledge, a blog version is here), below you can find some critical remarks on the MMT view of the EZ crisis part of a longer paper that will be published in Spanish. These remarks develop a bit further the post on MMT already published here which is also a section of the WP. Having said so, I am ready to acknowledge that along Godley 1992, De Grauwe 1998, Kelton and Wray (and few others like Barba and Pivetti) have provided prescient predictions of the forthcoming crisis, each emphasises one aspect of it.