My newest article at Pieria provides an overview of the post-Keynesian theories of consumers, producers, money/banking and trade:
A common charge directed at heterodox economics is that it is defined as a negative and has little to offer in the way of an alternative to mainstream economics (at least, if we ignore the ‘extremes’ of Austrianism and Marxism). It’s true that heterodox economists, including myself, often spend more time criticising mainstream economics than we do offering alternative theories. Yet there is in fact a large amount of work on alternative theories of pricing, distribution, finance and trade. Below I will sketch out what is known as the ‘Post-Keynesian’ (PK) approach to economic theory….
The summary echoes what I’ve said before about the difference between mainstream and heterodox economics:
First, post-Keynesians tend to emphasize that key variables (wages, the rate of interest) are monetary, not real phenomena. This doesn’t mean the notion of the real is unimportant – far from it – but it does mean that it is often a poor starting point for analysis. Second, there is generally no special status accorded to particular variables. Consumers and producers are not ‘optimising’; trade between countries can be imbalanced for long periods of time; the economy can remain in a state of depressed demand and no adjustment of prices will save it. Third, there is a lot of emphasis on institutional considerations. Since prices, demand and trade depend somewhat on social norms and agreements, and since agents tend to fix their decisions for long periods of time to maintain a degree of certainty, different economic trends can persist based on historical path dependence, and there is no ‘one size fits all’ model.
I have to say that I’m not sure why post-Keynesians don’t spend more time on this stuff. I find the theories pretty comprehensive and quite obviously more grounded in reality than the neoclassical approach.
