Category Archives: Melissa Kearney

A Must-Read: Editors’ Introduction to CWL 15, Sections 5 and 6

Serious readers – especially graduate students in economics – must do themselves a huge favor.  They owe it to themselves to read carefully two sections of Frederick G. Lawrence’s Editors’ Introduction of CWL 15,

[CWL 15] Lonergan, Bernard (1999), Macroeconomic Dynamics: An Essay in Circulation Analysis, ed. Frederick G. Lawrence, Patrick H. Byrne, and Charles Hefling, Jr., vol 15 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press) [CWL 15]

Section 5: Macroeconomic Dynamic Analysis as a New Paradigm of Economic Theory

Section 6: The Systematic Significance of the Fundamental Distinction Between Basic and Surplus Production and Exchange: A Normative Theory of the Pure Cycle

6.1 Profit

6.2 Interest

6.3 Lonergan’s Critique of ‘Supply-Side’ and Demand-Side’ Economics

Eventual mastery by serious readers of these sections plus the main text will help them secure influential professorships, research grants, board seats and other important advisory positions.  They will have the satisfaction of influencing beneficially those with whom they interact professionally and casually.

Two other key works:

[CWL 21] Lonergan, Bernard (1998), For a New Political Economy, ed. Philip McShane, vol 21 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press) [CWL 21]

[CWL 3] Lonergan, Bernard J. F. (1957 ) InsightA Study of Human Understanding, Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., London; and (1997) Toronto: University of Toronto Press [CWL 3, 1957/1997] 

 

Greg Mankiw’s First-Year Seminar: The Economic Isms And Schools Need A General Explanatory Macroeconomic Theory Providing A Reliable Analytic Framework

Part I – Introductory

Part II – List of questions relevant to the contents of Greg Mankiw’s First-Year Seminar

Part III – Repeating of the questions plus excerpts relevant to  each specific issue

Part I – Introductory

Greg Mankiw’s Blog, dated 9/11/2023, and  titled “This Year’s First-Year Seminar” (Click here) referred to his article in the New York Times, dated 9/10/2017, and titled “Getting Along by Getting Together.”  Please read Greg’s article. (Click here)

The 2017 article summarized the readings of that year’s similar seminar and Greg’s stated  purpose in teaching the course.  He is to be commended for his effort to get people of different economic “persuasions” to get along with one another. (Continue reading)

A Must-Read, Melissa Kearney’s “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind”

We try to prescind from psychology and to concentrate on formulating macroeconomics as the objective explanatory science of the dynamic economic process involving values. However, in two previous posts, we have seen fit to point out the importance of culture in the hierarchical scheme of human values. Click here  and here.

We have also, in a previous post, Just Thinkin’, questioned the effectiveness of throwing ever more money at what are fundamentally cultural problems. Continue reading