Wednesday, May 28, 2014

This Magazine of Untruth, Revisited

It is widely recognized that the assumption that wages are rigid is central to Keynes' explanation of the persistence of unemployment. J.E.S. 1984.
"[T]he Classical Theory has been accustomed to rest the supposedly self-adjusting character of the economic system on an assumed fluidity of money-wages; and, when there is rigidity, to lay on this rigidity the blame of maladjustment…. In its crudest form, this is tantamount to assuming that the reduction in money-wages will leave demand unaffected.… It is from this type of analysis that I fundamentally differ… J.M.K. 1936.
Two-thousands words into a blog post about the prehistory of "efficiency wage theory" I stumble across the first sentence above. Can anyone please explain to me what the point is of doing "rigorous scholarship" when that kind of slipshod hearsay misrepresentation fronts an entire industry of poverty-pimping, "theoretical modeling" of unemployment?

1 comment:

Sandwichman said...

"There is, therefore, no ground for the belief that a flexible wage policy is capable of maintaining a state of continuous full employment..." JMK, 1936