Epstein Secrets

vailable for business to borrow and invest. But business lacked the “animal spirits” to take such a risk ina slump. We saw the same story after 2008. Keynes’ proposal was for government to do the borrowing and investing instead. That’s part of the “fiscal policy” I described in Chapter 1. Here we tend to

saving is invested, as I use the word, but finds different returns. Saving under the mattress is investment at zero return, and drops output just as Keynes said. Investment at the current average return keeps output unchanged. That’s what Keynes meant. But investment at lower returns lowers output, and c

t cherry-picked to support Mill’s idea. They are all | have found. My source for national accounts including market-valued capital was the website of Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman adjusting their data to uniform accounting standards and measuring them in 2010 currency units. It also collects recent and past r

in the 1920s and reorganized them along Keynesian lines when the General Theory was published, reconstructed them back to 1870 for the U.S. economy. Piketty and Zucman incorporate this research and others. They have acted as editors only. As a layman, I would hardly be qualified to find and interpret orig

d their market value in return, as if on the books of a firm. Chapter 6: Parallels with the Firm 2/4/16 21 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011055 Marshall’s pupil Keynes was thoroughly a marginalist, as are economists in general today and as am I. One of the features of his General Theory of 1936 was a kind of double-

t the human capital of children. But Farr deserves credit for pointing out that human capital in general capitalizes pay less invested consumption. Keynes’ teacher Alfred Marshall agreed with Farr in 1990’. As I read this passage, Marshall interpreted maintenance consumption as investment. So did B. F.

estment. My charts and tables will never be exact. There are inevitably errors and judgment biases in the national accounts and research assembled by Piketty and Zucman, more added by them, and more by me. These cautions will apply to later chapters as well. Chapter 4 Mill’s Idea 1/11/16 28 HOUSE_OVERSI

ht also be surprised at my choice of benchmarks in verse and economics. Masefield and Mill? A consensus might have picked T. S. Elliot, say, and Lord Keynes. Masefield and Mill are likelier to be remembered as old-fashioned fuddy-duddies already outmoded when they wrote. But that’s me. I am Don Quixote. N

b paragraph on growth. The candidates for third seem well behind. Maybe Jevons or John Rae or Leon Walras. Time has not been kind to the teachings of Keynes. I would now rank his teacher Alfred Marshall higher. I like Myrdal’s magnificent ex ante - ex post distinction. Boehm Bawerk and the Austrian school

me. But my prescription is opposite. Reconceive it from scratch, and teach it right. Award Nobel prizes to those who help. My first nominees would be Piketty and Zucman. Not that I think much of Piketty’s arguments. But his website with Zucman is as powerful a new resource for scholarship and the database

o much inequality can undermine growth. Higher levels of income inequality increase political pressures, discouraging trade, investment, and hiring. Keynes first showed that income inequality can lead affluent households (Americans included) to increase savings and decrease consumption (1), while those w

is concentration of household income follows a long period in which income concentration remained relatively flat. Using U.S. tax returns, economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez found that income concentration dropped dramatically following both World Wars and was roughly unchanged for the next few decades (

ogical innovation that broadened their reach across global markets and a "winner take all" phenomenon. Another "superstar" is the "super managers." Piketty argues that the "primary reason for increased income inequality in recent decades is the rise of the super managers in both the financial and nonfina