There is an economics that works, that rescued the nation from the depths of the Great Depression, that organized the mobilization of World War II, that executed a successful transition from war to peace, that built the peace into prosperity, that explained the instability and decline, and that predicted the Great Financial Crisis. This economics was abandoned, partly for the benefit of a corporate oligarchy which now controls public policy. This economics now points the way out of stagnation and uncertainty, and it embraces the challenges of world poverty and global climate change. This is the economics of John Maynard Keynes and the new Deal. Demand Side Economics draws the history and explains the thinking of nine great economists. This is a cogent treatment of complex events and concepts that will lead the reader to an understanding of what happened and why. The policy answers it projects are 180 degrees from the austerity, small government and bail-outs for the few that is the current path. Massive private debt has conspired with an orthodox economics that literally ignores that debt to put the world in a financial vise. Public policy is controlled by those who must save an architecture that cannot be saved. Markets have become casinos, with chips provided by central banks, whose players keep the winnings, but shift any losses onto the taxpayer. The foundations of sturdy, stable growth are ignored or abandoned to the detriment of all. Public goods, the Commons, the long-term survival of the planet, and the needs of the world's poor are not costs which must be minimized, but opportunities to create value and organize recovery. It is ignoring the great challenges that is truly unaffordable History, theory, evidence, presented clearly for the reader's own conclusions. We present John Maynard Keynes, the godfather of macoeconomics and Demand Side economics; Leon Keyserling, representing the New Deal and the successful transition from war to prosperity under Harry Truman John Kenneth Galbraith, with his unapologetic look at the character of affluence and the rise of the corporation; Hyman Minsky, exploring his financial instability hypothesis, the main line of Keynes into Finance; Joseph Stiglitz, looking at the cruel hoax of free market capitalism foisted on the developing world; James K. Galbraith, bringing insight into the capture of government by the corporation; George Soros, explaining how markets really work; Steve Keen, developing Minsky and Keynes into compelling economic models that actually predict real outcomes; Nouriel Roubini, taking apart the European debt and banking crisis, and presaging the trouble to come. The book suggest that central bankers do not understand how money is created. Market-first economists imagine an economy that does not exist. General equilibrium forecasters propose an invisible hand that does not exist. Elaborate mathematical expressions of the workings of the economy - "models" - present an elegant description, but of an entirely hypo¬thetical world. Whole schools of economic thought, scores of careers, thousands of academic papers and texts have been built on patently false assumptions. Models commonly used to predict, even in the aftermath of a financial crisis born in the banking system, do not include a banking sector. Massive private debt is ignored, while at the same time the public sector - government - is excoriated for somehow slipping back through time to be the cause of the financial crisis. Jobs, physical and social infrastructure, and preparation for a looming climate crisis are all deemed too expensive to buy directly. This is exactly wrong. The first error of orthodox economics is that the economy is constrained by resources. It is constrained by demand. Direct spending on these critical needs is the route out of this Second Depression. Substantial, disciplined, public demand can right the economy for all sectors, and for our collective future.
About the Author: Alan Harvey produces the popular podcast "Demand Side Economics" available on iTunes (choose "demandside"). He is a writer and economist living in Seattle, Washington.