I gave talks to students in Berlin and Hamburg last week at the invitation of of Rethinking Economics groups at Berlin Free University and the University of Hamburg. Both groups asked me to cover some of the critiques of mainstream economics that I provide in Debunking Economics, as well as covering the monetary approach to Post Keynesian economics that has been the focus of most of my more recent public lectures.
I included a large number of references to Post Keynesian literature–both to fulfil the students’ requests, and to counter Diane Coyle’s claim in the recent BBC Radio 4 documentary Teaching Economics After The Crash that the students’ call to be taught Post Keynesian economics represents “going back to the economics of the 1930s and these almost Medieval Scholastic debates about what your world view was.” In fact, it’s a call to recognise an alternative research paradigm in economics that began 80 years ago and has been ignored by the Neoclassical mainstream since the 1970s.
The references are in the last 8 slides of the Hamburg lecture. As I note in that lecture, what I cover here is only a tiny fraction of the Post Keynesian literature. If you want a far more thorough overview, I recommend two books by John King:
- King, J. E. (2003). A History Of Post Keynesian Economics Since 1936. Aldershot, Edward Elgar.
- King, J. E., Ed. (2012). The Elgar Companion To Post Keynesian Economics. Aldershot, Edward Elgar.
The former is a comprehensive study of the history of Post Keynesian economic thought; the latter is a guide to numerous issues seen from the Post Keynesian perspective, with contributions from a large number of current Post Keynesian economists, including me.
