This article proposes a historical and analytical reconstruction of a debate that never happened between John Kenneth Galbraith and Abba Lerner over the issue of price controls. While they adopted a ...similar analysis of underemployment inflation, shared by many post Keynesians, Lerner and Galbraith remained fundamentally opposed as to the effectiveness of price controls. Indeed, while both agreed on the relevance of price controls in the specific context of World War II, they disagreed over including price controls within the conventional framework of economic policies, as illustrated by their respective stances in the debate surrounding the stagflation of the 1970s. Throughout the paper, we provide the rationales behind their divergence on price controls by investigating its theoretical, epistemological, and normative roots. Finally, we put into perspective the contemporary debates about price control in the context of resurgent inflationary pressures with some salient points drawn from our reconstruction of the debate that opposed these two pioneering post Keynesians economists.
This article looks back at the early development of industrial organisation at Harvard. It seeks to understand the emergence of the "Harvard tradition" around the spread of a set of common and ...identifiable tools and concepts. The paper identifies a specific subject of study bringing together a group of economists. This is the hypothesis of "mutual dependence recognized," which fosters the development of the theory of tacit collusion in oligopoly. This theory was developed by Edward Chamberlin and gradually taken up in several contributions from the 1930s and early 1940s by economists like Bain, de Chazeau, Galbraith, Kaysen, Mason, Schumpeter and Triffin. These authors, who all had connections with Harvard, appropriated Chamberlin's theory in pursuit of four goals. First, the possibility of tacit collusion in oligopoly allowed them to provide theoretical grounds for explaining price rigidities. Second, the oligopoly issue fostered the development of new tools for identifying oligopolies and accounting for firms' behaviour and strategic interaction. Third, these tools were regularly mobilised in debates among economists about the "basing point system". This pricing method was used at the time in the iron, steel and cement industries and led these economists to address the question of how effective antitrust laws were. Fourth, it led some Harvard economists to entirely reappraise the very nature of mid-century American capitalism.
Welfare for Markets is a stimulating and comprehensive book that fulfils the promise of offering “a global history of basic income”. After specifying the concept of Universal Basic Income (UBI)—an ...unconditional, individual, and universal monetary income—in the introduction, Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas explore, in time and space, the different proposals for guaranteed income in order to unfold the worldviews that underpin them. The book thus constitutes a history of UBI proposals and ...
The aim of the paper is to provide an exegesis of Galbraith's theory of consumption and the conception of preferences on which it is grounded, which has often been misunderstood. From the point of ...view of the history of economic thought, this paper sheds new light on the origins of Galbraith's analysis of consumption. This reappraisal also leads us to show that the latter is bound to a challenge to the Consumer Sovereignty Principle. Consequently, Galbraith's theory contradicts the logic underlying Welfare Economics. Thanks to this exegesis, I finally explain the rationale behind Galbraith's endorsement of the thesis of non-neutrality on the problem of value judgments in economics, which is illustrated by his presidential address to the American Economic Association.
À partir de la distinction entre les analogies catégorielles et les analogies formelles, cet article propose une reconstruction des analogies entre le marché et la démocratie mobilisées par des ...économistes du 20e siècle, ainsi qu’une interprétation de leurs usages. Cette reconstruction permet de mettre en évidence deux grandes représentations idéal-typiques des processus économiques et politiques véhiculées par le recours aux analogies démocratie-marché. Des économistes considèrent que les résultats des processus économiques et politiques sont ou doivent être essentiellement déterminés par le côté demande du marché, c’est-à-dire par les préférences des consommateurs et des citoyens. Il s’agit d’une vision du monde politique que nous qualifions de « démocratie de la demande ». D’autres estiment au contraire que le système économique et la démocratie sont des processus plutôt pilotés par le côté offre du marché. Au niveau de l’usage positif de l’analogie, nous défendons la thèse selon laquelle la vision en termes de démocratie de la demande est directement dépendante des hypothèses au fondement de l’économie néoclassique, de telle sorte que plus un économiste les met à distance, plus il propose une vision en termes de « démocratie de l’offre ». Les usages normatifs de l’analogie sont en revanche réfractaires à toute caractérisation simpliste.
This article proposes a historical and analytical reconstruction of a debate that never happened between John Kenneth Galbraith and Abba Lerner over the issue of price controls. While they adopted a ...similar analysis of underemployment inflation, shared by many post Keynesians, Lerner and Galbraith remained fundamentally opposed as to the effectiveness of price controls. Indeed, while both agreed on the relevance of price controls in the specific context of World War II, they disagreed over including price controls within the conventional framework of economic policies, as illustrated by their respective stances in the debate surrounding the stagflation of the 1970s. Throughout the paper, we provide the rationales behind their divergence on price controls by investigating its theoretical, epistemological, and normative roots. Finally, we put into perspective the contemporary debates about price control in the context of resurgent inflationary pressures with some salient points drawn from our reconstruction of the debate that opposed these two pioneering post Keynesians economists.
Starting from the distinction between “categorical” and “formal” analogies, this paper proposes a reconstruction of the analogies between market and democracy as well as an interpretation of their ...uses. This reconstruction reveals two main ideal-typical representations of economic and political processes conveyed by the use of democracy-market analogies by 20th century economists. Some of them consider that the outcomes of economic and political processes are or should be essentially determined by the demand side of the market, i.e. by the preferences of consumers and citizens. This is a political worldview that we call “demand-side democracy”. Others believe, on the contrary, that the economic system and democracy are processes driven by the supply side of the market. In terms of the positive use of the analogy, we argue that the demand-side democracy view is directly dependent on the assumptions underlying neoclassical economics, so that the more an economist distances himself from them, the more he proposes a “supply-side democracy” view. The normative uses of the analogy are however resistant to any simplistic characterization.
Chirat examines the genesis, construction, and reception of John Kenneth Galbraith's integral economics. This term refers to Galbraith's theoretical project--thought of as an alternative to ...conventional economics--which proposes integrated 'pattern models' of the functioning of the economic system of post-war American industrial society. Galbraith's notion of "conventional economics" combines highly diverse economic analyses. But they share three core postulates: the hypothesis of consumer sovereignty, the hypothesis of citizen sovereignty, and the hypothesis of profit maximization. These postulates lead to the exclusion of power outside economics; and it is against these that Galbraith has built his own theories of corporation, competition, and consumption.
