We are commenting with respect to Andrew Lilley and Kenneth Rogoff’s “conference draft” discussing the advisability of a FRB policy of negative interest rates:
Lilley, Andrew and Kenneth Rogoff, April 24, 2019: “The Case for Implementing Effective Negative Interest Rate Policy” (Conference draft for presentation at Strategies For Monetary Policy: A Policy Conference, the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, May 4, 2019, 9:15 am PST) [Lilley and Rogoff, 2019] (Continue reading)
Harvard Magazine’s podcast, “Ask a Harvard Professor,” recently featured an interview of professors Doug Elmendorf and Karen Dynan – two good people – under the title Doug Elmendorf and Karen Dynan: How Much Can the Federal Budget and the Deficit Continue to Grow? (Click here for video and print versions of the interview)
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 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.
Economic process – like other world processes – has an immanent intelligibility consisting of primary relativities which can be applied to the coincidental secondary determinations which occur throughout time in a non-systematic manifold. Economic process is constituted by schemes of recurrence under the dominance of abstract principles and laws; nevertheless, the actual concrete workings of the economic schemes of recurrence are shot through and throughout time with indeterminancy. So, it is a fact that prediction is impossible in the general case, since the concrete patterns of events occurring throughout time are a non-systematic aggregate. Thus, the point-to-line and higher correspondences are based upon the indeterminacy of the relation between current surplus products and the ultimate later basic products that eventually exit the dynamic process and enter into the standard of living.
An event in an economic scheme of recurrence has a diverging series of conditions. Continue reading
Humans have a need to predict and plan.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future, (T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton)
In his book, FREEFALL (2009, Penguin Books), Joseph Eugene Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University and a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979), states that economics is a predictive science. Now, one must distinguish between predicting a) planetary motion in its scheme of recurrence, and b) this afternoon’s weather vs. next month’s weather, or this afternoon’s prices and quantities vs. next year’s prices and quantities, all subject to to conditions diverging in space and time. (Continue reading)
The Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics Collaborative
Website: Bernard Lonergan’s Macroeconomic Field Theory
https://functionalmacroeconomics.com
functionalmacroeconomics@gmail.com
Brian C. Moyer, Director
Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)
4600 Silver Hill Road
Washington, DC 20233
Dear Mr. Moyer,
Presently the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) publishes three general versions of the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA).
Would it be possible for the BEA staff to develop a fourth which would be explanatory of the production-and-exchange process? Continue reading
There is required a shift of focus by academics from the concrete secondary determinations of prices and quantities in a non-systematic manifold to the immanent, abstract, primary relativities which may be applied to these secondary determinations to reach particular laws.
Paraphrasing [McShane, 1980, 127]: Taking into account past and (expected) future values does not constitute the creative key transition to Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics. Continue reading
The process is always the current, purely dynamic process. The analysis is purely functional, purely relational and explanatory analysis. The theory is general and universally applicable to concrete determinations in any Instance; The theory is a normative theory having a condition of equilibrium.
Our subheadings in this treatment are as follows:
Always the Current Process: Continue reading