A very expensive macroeconomics textbook, having 700-1000 pages, would contain a lot of interesting history, a lot of fuzzy psychology, unscientific analysis, and uncertain conclusions. A reader would not gain a clear theory and complete explanation of the dynamics of the real economic process. However, is there not a superior 228-page, far less expensive textbook right in our hands? How about this? Reword the subtitle of CWL 15 from An Essay in Circulation Analysis to A Textbook of Circulation Analysis, and let the professor instruct the serious student to read the book three times, then report back to discuss the following:
- the canons of empirical method
- a scientific, dynamic heuristic
- the technique of implicit definition; explanatory terms defined by the functional relations in which they stand with one another
- velocitous functional unities of scientific and explanatory significance replacing the BEA’s descriptive, commonsense, accountants’ unities
- the structure of the lagged, rectilinear productive process
- money as a dummy invented by man
- the perspective of a hierarchical series of monetary circuits
- how a monetary circulation meets the rectilinear production-and-vending process
- the primary relativities and concomitance in the Diagram of Rates of Flow
- dynamic equilibrium replacing static Walrasian general equilibrium
- the velocity of money in terms of magnitudes and frequencies
- prices are not a given and not requiring explanation; rather prices are in need of explanation
- interpretation of prices, quantities, interest rates in the light of significant explanatory variables
- the pure cycle and its constituent phases in the expansion of the objective economic process
- the abstract primary relativities and concrete secondary determinations in the expansion of the economic process
- the statistical residue and why prediction is impossible in the general case; predicting weather vs. predicting planetary motion
- the significance of investment’s monetary correlate
- the ineptitude of manipulating interest rates
- the explanation of government and foreign-trade imbalances by the dynamics of superposed circuits
- the distinction between efficient cause and formal cause
- distinguishing between self-healing and the effect of interventions
- the intelligibility and explanatory power of the basic price-spread ratio
- Figures 14-1, 24-7, and 27-1 in CWL 15
The student would learn much that is radically different, explanatory, and very useful; and he/she would gain a perspective or framework by which to evaluate and criticize the flawed premises and tenets of conventional textbooks and traditional theories.
