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wiiw Seminar Series
'Crisis Management in Central, East and Southeast Europe: What is
to be done?' |
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Lance
Taylor, Arnhold Professor of International Cooperation and
Development, New School for Social Research, New York
Maynard's Revenge: The Collapse of Free Market Macroeconomics
26 May 2010, 5 p.m. |
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It is now
widely agreed that mainstream macroeconomics is irrelevant and
that there is need for a more useful and realistic economic
analysis that can provide a better understanding of the ongoing
global financial and economic crisis. Lance Taylor’s presentation,
based on his forthcoming book, exposes the unrealistic assumptions
of the rational expectations and real business cycle approaches
and of mainstream finance theory. It argues that in separating
monetary and financial behaviour from real behaviour, they do
not address the ways that consumption, accumulation, and the
government play in the workings of the economy. Taylor argues
that the ideas of J. M. Keynes and others provide a more useful
framework both for understanding the crisis and for dealing
with it effectively. Keynes’s basic points were fundamental
uncertainty and the absence of Say’s Law. He set up machinery
to analyse the macro economy under such circumstances, including
the principle of effective demand, liquidity preference, different
rules for determining commodity and asset prices, distinct behavioral
patterns of different collective actors, and the importance
of thinking in terms of complete macro accounting schemes. Economists
working in this tradition also worked out growth and cycle models.
Employing these ideas throughout Maynard’s Revenge, Taylor provides
an analytical narrative about the causes of the crisis, and
suggestions for dealing with it.
Lance Taylor is Arnhold Professor of International Cooperation
and Development, New School for Social Research. He received
a BS degree with honors in mathematics from the California Institute
of Technology in 1962 and a PhD in economics from Harvard University
in 1968. Lance Taylor then became a professor in the economics
departments at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
as well as being a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota,
the Universidade da Brasilia, Delhi University, and the Stockholm
School of Economics. He moved to the New School in 1993. He
has published widely in the areas of macroeconomics, development
economics, and economic theory. Taylor has been a visiting scholar
or policy advisor in over 25 countries including Chile, Brazil,
Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, Russia, Egypt, Kuwait, Tanzania, Zimbabwe,
South Africa, Pakistan, India, and Thailand. His recent books
include: Varieties of Stabilization Experience, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1988; Income Distribution, Inflation, and
Growth: Lectures on Structuralist Macroeconomic Theory,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991; The Rocky Road to Reform:
Adjustment, Income Distribution, and Growth in the Developing
World, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993; The Market Meets
its Match: Restructuring the Economies of Eastern Europe
(with Alice Amsden and Jacek Kochanowicz), Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 1994; Global Finance at Risk: The Case
for International Regulation (with John Eatwell), New York
NY: The New Press, 2000; External Liberalization, Economic
Performance, and Social Policy, New York NY: Oxford University
Press, 2001; Reconstructing Macroeconomics: Structuralist
Proposals and Critiques of the Mainstream, Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press, 2004; External Liberalization in
Asia, Post-Socialist Europe, and Brazil, New York NY: Oxford
University Press, 2006; Maynard’s Revenge: The Collapse of
Free Market Macroeconomics, Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 2010. |
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