Alternative Visions - What’s Wrong With Economists - 11/27/13




Alternative Visions show

Summary: Dr. Jack Rasmus takes the two dominant wings of academic economics—what he calls the ‘Hybrid Keynesians’ and the ‘Retro Classicalists’—to explain why their predictions have been consistently wrong about the US and global economies since 2008. Why the 10,000 professional economists failed (with a handful of exceptions) to predict the 2008-09 crash, why most inaccurately predicted a quick, V-shaped, recovery that hasn’t happened, and why they are again failing to see the drift toward yet another global crisis. Rasmus explains why the ‘Hybrid Keynesians’ aren’t really Keynesian, and why the Retro Classicalists cannot explain the 21stcentury global economy in terms of 19thcentury classical economics. Both fail to understand the nature and role of debt, credit, income, and financial speculation in the 21stcentury, while continuing to adhere to simplistic notions of money, money supply, interest rates as solutions to a slow economic recovery, and short term government subsidy spending as a long term solution to investment, jobs, and real income growth. Both Retros and Hybrids labor with an outmoded conceptual apparatus and models that are increasing irrelevant to the real world. With incorrect analyses, they propose incorrect solutions—or no solutions at all