About six months ago, at a fundraising event for the nonprofit I founded, Project H, a six-year-old girl handed me a pickle jar full of pennies....
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A very Impressive work! An ambitious non-academic book that covers not only a critique of the basic conservative economic ideas of the Reagan Revolution and their dismal track record, but also positively challenges liberals to frame an alternative economic theory. The Republicans are not practicing conservative economics anymore, and keep the economy barely alive with massive Keynesian-style deficits, skewed primarily to enrich the wealthy part of their base. Their experiments in supply side economics, monetarism, have failed and deregulation has been a mixed bag of Enron-like disasters and moderate sucesses, at the expense of workers. This overenrichment of CEO's has actually weakened US Corporate structure, once the envy of the world. The very few get rich by tapping into public programs, without any corresponding benefit to the public. They escape from regulation and game the system, They are the Predators, with active state support (Parasites might be more accurate). This drains the treasury and prevents the country from addressing real problems, such as global warming, health care, energy supply, income inequality, ect, But we have the freedom to shop!
In challenging the Republicans, the Democrats frequently engage in an intellectual argument as if their adversaries still believed in their conservative economic principles. For instance Democrats will try to balance the budget. JG argues liberals need to break the conservative market-based mindset, in order to think in terms of longer-term planning, as all societies must, and the market cannot do.
James Galbraith is a New Deal Keynesian, like his father John Kenneth Galbraith, and gives us a brief exposure to a few of the central ideas of the neglected New Industrial State, but with considerable updating to apply to our new economic reality. One is challenged to think of public utilities being natural monopolies, and labor not actually having a supply curve, a return to a forgotten institutional economics. What is remarkable this is done in 200 breif pages without any of the partisan whining or disparagement more typical of many books about political economy.
I await the academic sequel from this author!
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The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too by James Galbraith
peogren, September 3, 2008
A very Impressive work! An ambitious non-academic book that covers not only a critique of the basic conservative economic ideas of the Reagan Revolution and their dismal track record, but also positively challenges liberals to frame an alternative economic theory. The Republicans are not practicing conservative economics anymore, and keep the economy barely alive with massive Keynesian-style deficits, skewed primarily to enrich the wealthy part of their base. Their experiments in supply side economics, monetarism, have failed and deregulation has been a mixed bag of Enron-like disasters and moderate sucesses, at the expense of workers. This overenrichment of CEO's has actually weakened US Corporate structure, once the envy of the world. The very few get rich by tapping into public programs, without any corresponding benefit to the public. They escape from regulation and game the system, They are the Predators, with active state support (Parasites might be more accurate). This drains the treasury and prevents the country from addressing real problems, such as global warming, health care, energy supply, income inequality, ect, But we have the freedom to shop!In challenging the Republicans, the Democrats frequently engage in an intellectual argument as if their adversaries still believed in their conservative economic principles. For instance Democrats will try to balance the budget. JG argues liberals need to break the conservative market-based mindset, in order to think in terms of longer-term planning, as all societies must, and the market cannot do.
James Galbraith is a New Deal Keynesian, like his father John Kenneth Galbraith, and gives us a brief exposure to a few of the central ideas of the neglected New Industrial State, but with considerable updating to apply to our new economic reality. One is challenged to think of public utilities being natural monopolies, and labor not actually having a supply curve, a return to a forgotten institutional economics. What is remarkable this is done in 200 breif pages without any of the partisan whining or disparagement more typical of many books about political economy.
I await the academic sequel from this author!
(9 of 11 readers found this comment helpful)