[OPE] More about Keynesianism...

adsl675281@telfort.nl

At the site of the German Left Party (Die Linke), Harry Nick writes (11 April 2008)

"Geht es um die Differenz zwischen Keynes und den Neoliberalen, bin ich zu 100 Prozent Keynesianer; geht es um die Differenz zwischen Marx und Keynes, bin ich zu 100 Prozent Marxist." http://www.die-linke.de/index.php?id=1767 (In case you don't read German, "If it is a question of Keynes or the Neoliberals, I am 100% Keynesian, but if it is a question of Marx or Keynes, I am 10% Marxist".

Winfried Wolf's dissident German journal on the world economy, called Lunapark21, has a feature on Keynesianism in Heft 2008/2 with articles by Manfred Szameitat (Vom Nutzen keynesianischer Wirtschaftspolitik) and Sebastian Gerhardt (Die Sachverwalter des Kapitals haben von Keynes gelernt). http://www.lunapark21.net/aktuell.html

A French writer commented in 2007: "France created more private sector jobs (+10% between 1996-2002, according to the OECD) than either the UK (+6%) or the US (+5%). In fact, the UK economy has barely created any net employment in the private sector in the past five years, but, thanks to increased public spending, has seen a remarkable rise in public sector jobs. This reflects the fact that UK and US growth rates have been boosted, to a large extent, by massive increases in public spending (from 34% to 37% of GDP in the US, and from 38% to 45% in the UK between 2001 and 2006). In the British case, this Keynesian stimulation (directed towards the healthcare and education sectors) has been paid for by tax increases and the last few years of the North Sea bonanza; in the case of the US, the Bush administration (to finance the Iraq war) has presided over an unprecedented increase in public debt - doubled by a private debt binge, with households borrowing (on the strength of an equally unprecedented housing bubble) to compensate for the stagnation of their income. One really has to wonder what France is being told to imitate: what Tony Blair and George Bush say, or what they do?" http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2007/5/4/113029/9034

There is a tendency to identify Keynesianism with state interventionism (see e.g.  http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/un/1996/analysis.htm ). However this ignores that state interventionism occurred before and after the Keynesian era, and need not have anything to do with Keynesian economics specifically.

Jurriaan

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