Geoff Dow

The Economic Consequences of Economists

During 1991, disquiet with the policy recommendations and ultimate economic effects of economists began to feature in debates over economic policy in Australia. One example was the emergence of a conservative critique of economic liberalism; another was the publication of Michael Puseys research showing that ‘econocrats’, notably those in the federal bureaucracy, have distinctive, politically significant attitudes to the role of government. This paper considers the influence of economic orthodoxy as part of a broader phenomenon—the peculiarity and underdevelopment of our public institutional framework. In Australia, forms of intervention required for full employment simply do not exist. This partially explains both our comparatively poor macroeconomic performance since the 1970s and the propensity of government to embrace policies that abrogate social democratic commitments while economic conditions worsen.

Wolfgang Streeck's conception of the crisis-phase of democratic politics: a post-Keynesian critique

ABSTRACT Depictions of the politics of crisis in advanced societies (what crisis is and what can be done) continue to pit different strands of political science and heterodox political economy against each other. Economic sociologist Wolfgang Streecks contributions to these controversies have emphasised ‘embeddedness’, or the need for economies to incorporate non-functional or deliberated elements which allow functional and market-focused processes to play themselves out. Streecks recent writings on debt-induced crisis nonetheless accept too much orthodox liberal disquiet: most fatefully, a contempt for politics based on what seems to be an untenable assertion – that rich societies have hit the limits of their capacity to increase taxation. Capitalism has entered an ‘end point’, he claims. This article presents, again, contrary evidence and offers suggestions for a revised heterodox understanding of capitalisms current malaise.

Keynes, Bloomsbury and method

Abstract Maynard Keynes’s precocious upbringing in Cambridge (including as a member of the Apostles) and, later, his involvement in the Bloomsbury group, allowed important methodological controversies to be acknowledged – initially through his father’s sympathy towards anti-economistic ways of knowing. This burgeoned into an interdisciplinary distinctiveness, which easily sustained some later radicalisms in Keynesian and post-Keynesian political economy. The intellectual climate at the time additionally included European modernist movements in literature, the arts, philosophy, other social sciences and morals. We now know that many of the controversies characterising heterodox political economy had emerged in scholarly discussion generally; they became implanted (if contentiously) into social enquiry and political economy as they matured throughout the nineteenth century.