Category Archives: Michael Gibbons

More re Picketty’s Plight and Centralist Modern Monetary Theory

In his blog entitled “Picketty in Brief,” dated Sunday, July 24, 2022, N. Gregory Mankiw asks what might be Thomas Picketty’s present thinking about inequality. Has it changed?  If so, how and why?  Also see on this website “Picketty’s Plight.”  in which we quote Philip McShane’s claim that, unless one has a normative explanatory theory yielding precepts as to how enlightened participants in the economic process should adapt and conduct themselves, one can only helplessly and hopelessly suggest harmful bureaucratic centralist solutions – such as disequilibrating taxation and intrinsicallyinflationary deficit spending. Continue reading

The Principle of Concomitance: The Foundation of Continuity, Equilibrium, and Explanatory Theory

Contents

  • .1. Concomitance and Correlation in Macroeconomic Field theory
  • .2. Five Notes re Abstraction; Abstraction is Enriching
  • .3. Resume Focus on Concomitance and Correlation in Macroeconomic Field Theory

.1. Concomitance and Correlation in Macroeconomic Field theory

Concomitance is, I would claim, the key word in Lonergan’s economic thinking. [Philip McShane, [Fusion 1, page 4 ftnt 10]

 All science begins from particular correlations, but the key discovery is the interdependence of the whole.…its basic terms are defined by their functional relations[CWL 15, 53, 54, and 177]

(Continue reading)