Friday, November 11, 2022

Palley on the history of the Review of Keynesian Economics

Here a short video. I do offer a few remarks. I would add that Louis-Philippe was central not just in the initial discussions that we had going back two decades now, to when we were at Kalamazoo College, but in getting Elgar into the journal business. Not sure Elgar would have done that without LP convincing them. This happened at the time that the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics (JPKE) was transitioning from Paul Davidson editorship, to the Jan Kregel and Randy Wray period.


I suggested Tom to LP, since he had been our teacher at the New School, and I thought three would be a better setting for adjudicating differences between the editors. Tom wanted a journal more open to other traditions. I would say in my view the reasons are not exactly connected to pluralism, as Tom discusses in the clip, and more to the restoration of a political alliance that was more or less in place during the Golden Age, between neoclassical synthesis Keynesians like Bob Solow (who is a member of the board) and people like Joan Robinson. That's why I suggested the Godley-Tobin lecture that in my view makes that alliance explicit. In that sense, the plan, that was originally in LP's plan a post-Keynesian journal related to monetary issues, to not compete directly with the JPKE, became the non-hyphenated Keynesian journal.

PS: And yes, the story of why the hyphen in the JPKE, as told to me by Paul Davidson, is that it couldn't be the Journal of Keynesian Economics, since the acronym would be JOKE! The term post-Keynesian (or is it Post Keynesian) already existed, but in my view it was the JPKE that sedimented its use, and in a sense that was an accident.

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