Michael Meeropol

A Radical Teaching A Straight Principles of Economics Course

our departments call Principles of Economics courses. These courses serve the function, especially in non-elite schools, of mystifying the ordinary citizen into &dquo;understanding&dquo; why certain things are the way they are in the United States. I put &dquo;understanding&dquo; in quotes because in fact the obscurity and formalism of the courses rather serves to convince students that it is all too complicated for their &dquo;feeble&dquo; brains. Either way, the course usually serves to obscure the conflicts and negative features of the system under which we live. As teaching radical economists, we can act to counter this deception. It may seem a drop in the bucket when stacked against 16 years of mis-education, but we must recognize that every seed of doubt, of real questioning, of true education (namely the inculcation of critical thinking and the stimulation of intellectual curiousity) is worth planting. We are not alone as individuals; there are other teachers like us in these students’, pasts and futures. Afterwards, we must hope that when structural tensions in the system produce a similar short-run spasm to that which occurred in the 1960’s, the seeds we plant will take root and flower. Until events and trends move many, we must painstakingly continue to try and move people by

How URPE Helped This “Tenured Radical” Thrive in a Non-radical Economics Department

I joined URPE when it was first formed in 1968 and found a strong support group in the Springfield-Northampton-Amherst area of Western Massachusetts when I got my first teaching job. I was at a teaching institution where the Economics program mostly serviced students from the School of Business. Having a support group of like-minded radicals in the early 1970s gave me the confidence and support to develop my own approach to teaching that combined presenting mainstream analysis and making all students aware of the existence and substance of radical alternatives. Those early years of URPE were a heady time—we were involved in struggles to make sure radicals were not purged by hostile departments. We attended conferences and wrote articles and participated in local struggles. Most importantly, unlike, for example, Paul Baran at Stanford University who lamented in a letter to Paul Sweezy that he had “no one to talk to,” we had each other—we had the Review of Radical Political Economics (RRPE)—and we had visions of changing not just economics but the world. We still need that hope and enthusiasm today.

The myth of Rubinomics

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to analyze and understand the Rubinomics hypothesis or the argument that “fiscal discipline” will bring private investment to a growth path as a result of a decrease in real interest rates, during the 1990s in the USA. Design/methodology/approach - The paper relies on a range of previously published works and macroeconomic data to test the Rubinomics hypothesis. Findings - The paper concludes based on data from the experience of the US economy during the 1990s that the evidence does not validate the arguments of Rubinomics. Originality/value - The “crowding-out” debate is an important controversy in macroeconomics. By shedding light over this controversial issue, this paper shows that the US experience during the so-called roaring 1990s, a period of extraordinary “fiscal discipline,” did not follow the classical crowding-out hypothesis.

Genesis of the Monopoly Capital Interpretation of U.S. Economy Dynamics

This review article focuses on only one aspect of the Correspondence between Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy– the genesis of the “monopoly capital stagnation thesis” as elaborated in their jointly authored Monopoly Capital. In early 1956, Baran and Sweezy determined to work together on elaborating on what both had independently arrived at in earlier work – a belief that the long run tendency for capitalism in the 20th century was towards stagnation due to the fact that the system was generating a rising economic surplus and was faced with increasing difficulties in “absorbing” the surplus. Baran had defined economic surplus in his earlier work, The Political Economy of Growth while Sweezy had predicted a tendency towards stagnation (he called it “underconsumption”) in his earlier work The Theory of Capitalist Development. When they determined to work together on what they subtitled An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, their correspondence shows that they were dissatisfied with their earlier efforts. They determined to demonstrate that when the structure of the American economy moved from a system of small competitive firms acting as “price takers” to a few giants dominating most industries acting as “price makers” the dynamics of American capitalism created the tendency towards stagnation evidenced in the Great Depression. They spent most of the book (and the correspondence reflects this) analyzing the various counter-acting tendencies that (temporarily) kept the stagnation wolf from the door. Today when the mainstream has discovered stagnation again, their analysis could not be more timely. The Age of Monopoly Capital: The Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, 1949–1964. Edited and Annotated by Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017. Hardcover, 544 pages.

“A Spy Who Turned His Family In”: Revisiting David Greenglass and the Rosenberg Case

59.00 none defined

The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism

“Doubtless if that [Greenglass] testimony were disregarded, the convictions could not stand.” (Opinion of the US Circuit Court of Appeals affirming the convictions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg)Eth...

Dynamics of the Current Crisis

In 1998, Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw published The Commanding Heights—a tour de horizon of the transformation of the relationship between governments and the economy between 1979 and the end of the 1990s. The book covered the end of communism in the former Soviet bloc, the transformation of the Chinese economy under Deng Xiaoping, and the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions in the United States and the UK. In describing changes in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, the book described the rise and fall of the post–Great Depression version of the mixed economy. The changes wrought in these countries beginning in 1979 occurred because events in the 1970s undermined the intellectual supports for both the centrally planned system of Soviet-style communism and the government intervention in the social democratic European countries as well as in the United States under the post–New Deal mixed economy. These events gave credence to the ideas of opponents of both systems, for example, the economist Freidrich Hayek. The emerging dominant ideology that they describe is one of free market laissez -faire economics—an ideology that they believe triumphed as a result of the failures of the more interventionist systems. Though they never use the term, they are describing the rise of what David Kotz refers to as neoliberalism. His book covers some of the same ground, but he has the benefit of writing in 2015, whereas Yergin and Stanislaw published their book in 1998. More importantly, however, whereas Yergin and Stanislaw suggest that the downfall of the postwar system in Europe and the United States is the result of the triumph of ideas, Kotz argues persuasively that it is actually the result of the exercise of power by those who benefit from the capitalist economic organization of society. The analysis and evidence he brings to bear in support of the role of power exercised by business and political leaders is a most valuable aspect of this book—one among

by John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff

Sometimes, it is useful to take a step back and remind ourselves why recessions occur and why recoveries usually follow shortly thereafter. Having done that, we can try to understand the causes of far more serious recessions and what must be done to recover. The authors point out how such severe recessions, including the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009, differ profoundly from most others.

Distorting Adam Smith on Trade

Challenge/May–June 2009 121 Challenge, vol. 52, no. 3, May/June 2009, pp. 121–129.

Surrender: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution

The author argues that neoliberal economists incorrectly use Adam Smith as their source of inspiration for current views about outsourcing and the distribution of income. Whether or not Smith was right, he was not indifferent to the consequences of either foreign investment or the inequality of income.