August 16, 2012

Keynes’ Employment Function and the Gratuitous Phillips Curve Disaster {34}


Keynes had many plausible things to say about unemployment and its causes. His ‘mercurial mind’, though, relied on intuition which means that he could not strictly prove his hypotheses. This explains why Keynes's ideas immediately invited bastardizations. One of them, the Phillips curve synthesis, turned out to be fatal. This paper identifies Keynes's undifferentiated employment function as a sore spot. It is replaced by the structural employment function that supersedes also the bastard Phillips curve. It will be demonstrated in a formal rigorous way why there is no trade-off between price inflation and unemployment. The structural Phillips curve predicts stagflation.

August 12, 2012

The common error of common sense: an essential rectification of the accounting approach {33}

Working paper at SSRN

Abstract  The present paper takes the explanatory superiority of the integrated monetary approach for granted. It will be demonstrated that the accounting approach could do even better provided it frees itself from theoretically ill-founded notions like GDP and other artifacts of the equilibrium approach. National accounting as such does not provide a model of the economy but is the numerical reflex of the underlying theory. It is this theory that will be scrutinized, rectified, and ultimately replaced in the following. The formal point of reference is ‘the integrated approach to credit, money, income, production, and wealth’ of Godley and Lavoie.