How good were you in studies and did you study Economic in college with interest ! ~ do you like working long hours in Office, idling time, enjoying your time socializing or spending more time with our loved ones than in making money, - what are our priorities and who set them?Back in 1930, John Maynard Key predicted that the working week would be drastically cut, to perhaps 15 hours a week, with people choosing to have far more leisure as their material needs were satisfied. The world was then gripped by a dreadful slump but in the long run Keynes was sure mankind was solving its economic problems. More than a hundred years have passed by, and the younger generation works, sleeps and lives in Office !!
In the
colonial ear, there was ‘India Office’, a British government department established in
London in 1858 to oversee the administration, through a Viceroy and other
officials, of the Provinces of British India. Upon the partition of British
India in 1947 into the two new independent dominions of India and Pakistan, the
India Office was closed down. In October
1906, Keynes's Civil Service career began as a clerk in the India Office. He enjoyed his work at first, but by 1908 had
become bored and resigned his position to return to Cambridge and work on probability
theory, at first privately funded only by two dons at the university – his
father and the economist Arthur Pigou.
The General Theory
of Employment, Interest and Money of 1936 is the last and most important book
by the English economist John Maynard Keynes. It created a profound shift in
economic thought, giving macroeconomics a central place in economic theory and
contributing much of its terminology– the "Keynesian Revolution". It
had equally powerful consequences in economic policy, being interpreted as
providing theoretical support for government spending in general, and for
budgetary deficits, monetary intervention and counter-cyclical policies in
particular. It is pervaded with an air of mistrust for the rationality of
free-market decision making. Keynes
denied that an economy would automatically adapt to provide full employment
even in equilibrium, and believed that the volatile and ungovernable psychology
of markets would lead to periodic booms and crises.
John Maynard
Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, CB FBA [1883 –
1946] was a British economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and
practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. He built
on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and was
one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. Widely considered
the founder of modern macroeconomics, his ideas are the basis for the school of
thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots.During the Great
Depression of the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking,
challenging the ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets
would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as
long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. He argued that aggregate
demand (total spending in the economy) determined the overall level of economic
activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods
of high unemployment. Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies
to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. In the
mid to late-1930s, leading Western economies adopted Keynes's policy
recommendations. Almost all capitalist governments had done so by the end of
the two decades following Keynes's death in 1946.
The early stage of
the Keynesian Revolution took place in the years following the publication of
Keynes' General Theory in 1936. It saw the neoclassical understanding of
employment replaced with Keynes' view that demand, and not supply, is the
driving factor determining levels of employment. With that lengthy background,
read this news item titled -‘Less Keynes, More
Love: Russian Economics Textbook Pulled For Not Praising The Motherland’ !!
A textbook on
economics has been banned from use in Russian schools after an expert review
deemed it lacking in patriotism, its author told RFE/RL.Igor Lipsits, a professor at the Faculty of
Business and Management at Moscow's Higher School of Economics, said that he
received an e-mail from his publisher Vita-Press with instructions to edit the
book in line with an expert review ordered by the Russian Education Academy, a
government body focused on pedagogy. The high-school text had been removed from
the Education Ministry's list of approved textbooks, Lipsits was told, meaning
Russian schools can no longer purchase and use the title in classes.The expert review, a copy of which was
provided to RFE/RL by Lipsits, notes that "the examples cited [in the book]
do not promote love for the Motherland."
In its e-mail dated
February 1, which Lipsits forwarded to RFE/RL, Vita-Press recommended that the
author add details about unspecified "plans for the next economic
breakthrough" and discuss the influence of the government's import
substitution -- a campaign launched after Russia embargoed certain food imports
in response to Western sanctions - - on people's "sense of pride in the
country." Vita-Press head Lyudmila Antonova confirmed in an interview with
the Russian daily Kommersant that the recommendations included in the letter
came at least in part from the expert review. What exactly "facilitating
love for the Motherland" involved, or when the next economic breakthrough
was expected, was not made clear.
Lipsits said that
the textbook had previously passed expert reviews by two government bodies, but
the subsequent review ordered by the Education Ministry reached a negative
verdict and demanded that revisions are made. The Russian Education Academy
told Kommersant that the Education Ministry was responsible for the expert
analysis. The ministry, for its part, denied involvement in the final review. Lipsits
said he has no intention of adding "gleeful words about an economic boom
and patriotic fervor in favor of import substitution.""I've become
unused to writing such things in the 25 years" since the Soviet Union
ended, he told Kommersant, "and I'm not keen to revive my skills at
windbaggery."
"My conception
of patriotism was formed way back in my youth," he later wrote on
Facebook. "Since 2012, the Russian
Education Ministry has overseen a campaign to censor high-school textbooks and
introduce stricter controls over their content. Enlightenment, a publisher with
ties to Putin's inner circle, emerged with a near-monopoly over the textbook
market that it continues to enjoy today.In May 2018, Russian Textbook, a nonprofit representing textbook
publishers, sent an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin signed by
several dozen authors. The association lists around 30 publishers as its
members, but does not include Enlightenment. In the letter, the authors
criticized the government's expert review process, pointing out that the
federal textbook list has not been renewed for over four years and most titles
on the list have not been updated since 2012.
Concluding its
e-mail to Lipsits, the publisher Vita-Press predicted that the Education
Ministry's demands from textbook authors would only get stricter in the future.
With regards – S.
Sampathkumar
11th Feb
2019.
Pic credit
: financial express
Article
credit: www.rferl.org
