Structuralist (Keynesian) Response to Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century

A series of papers that provide more than a review a collective response to Piketty's book can be found here. It was part of a mini-symposium organized by Lance Taylor, co-sponsored by the New School and INET.

BRICS Bank mini-symposium at the IDEAS Network

The International Development Economics Associates (IDEAS) Network has published a series of short papers on the BRICS Bank, from the more negative views of Prabhat Patnaik, that suggests that the South continues to pursue neoliberal policies and the bank will not be of much help in this context, to the more optimistic of my good friend Oscar Ugarteche (second part here), who thinks that the declaration of the last BRICS Summit had a distinctive anti-neoliberal flavor, and that the bank might be one of the pillars of an alternative to the neoliberal order, in which the dollar has a less prominent role. Jayati Ghosh's views are also less pessimistic than Patnaik (for my preliminary thoughts go here).

Prabhat Patnaik - Finance and Growth Under Capitalism

By Prabhat Patnaik

Once we reject Say’s Law and recognize that capitalism is prone to deficiency in aggregate demand, we have to accept that sustained growth in this system requires exogenous stimuli. By exogenous stimuli I mean a set of factors which raise aggregate demand but are not themselves dependent upon the fact that growth has been occurring in the system; that is, they operate irrespective of whether or not growth has been occurring in the system. Moreover, they raise aggregate demand by a magnitude that increases with the size of the economy, for instance with the size of the capital stock. They are in other words different from “erratic shocks” on the one hand, and “endogenous stimuli”, such as the multiplier‐accelerator mechanism, on the other: the latter can perpetuate or accelerate growth only if it has been occurring anyway.

Read rest here.