Raising Keynes

“Marglin has taken 80 years of neoclassical distortions of Keynes, presented them with great clarity in their own language, and then pounded them into dust, pushing the detritus back into the faces of the high priests of the neoclassical synthesis, the New Keynesians, and the New Classical Economists. Raising Keynes issues a challenge that they would be cowardly to refuse—which is not to suggest that they won’t do their best to ignore it.”—James K. Galbraith, Project Syndicate

“Stephen Marglin’s magnum opus makes a powerful case that we cannot expect the economy to solve its own problems, and that instead economists and policymakers need to put persistent unemployment at the center of their thinking in order to both better understand the economy and to make a stronger case for using fiscal and monetary policy to change it for the better.”—Jason Furman, Harvard University, former Chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers

“This is a thought-stimulating reconstruction of John Maynard Keynes’s insight that market economies do not automatically gravitate to full-employment equilibrium even if prices are flexible. Stephen Marglin shows, with modern analytical tools and (yet) in an often entertaining style, how normal signal processing leads to real-time adjustments to shocks that can move a competitive economy out of equilibrium in the short run and into a different equilibrium in the long. He succeeds in demonstrating this without invoking all those frictions and imperfections so indispensable to New Keynesians. The book opens a wide array of unorthodox, but well-founded perspectives on past and current issues of economic policy. It is the fruit of life-long research, and it deserves a wide readership.”—Hans-Michael Trautwein, University of Oldenburg, Germany

“Raising Keynes is a work of great significance that anyone seriously interested in how capitalism functions and malfunctions should read carefully. Stephen Marglin succeeds in clarifying the central ideas in John Maynard Keynes’s revolutionary macroeconomic framework, while also extending and deepening those ideas in important ways, applying the ideas to our contemporary conditions, and also delivering devastating critiques of orthodox macroeconomic theory and practice. The book is also highly accessible for a work of this nature, without skimping at all on technical details—an almost impossible combination to pull off.”—Robert Pollin, University of Massachusetts Amherst