This post concerns total value creation (Marx) in a context of demand-determined output and employment (Kalecki, Keynes). A ‘macro rule’ employed by Marx seems central to this connection. Marx held that, in real terms, an hour of average living labor “always yields the same amount of value, independently of any variations in productivity” (Marx, 1990, Capital, Vol. 1, Penguin Edition, p. 137). Value in ‘real’ terms is expressed as an amount of socially necessary labor time, whereas ‘nominal’ value is expressed in terms of a monetary unit of account. If it is true, as Marx maintained, that an hour of average living labor always creates the same real value, then at the aggregate level, total ‘productive’ employment provides a straightforward measure of ‘new value added’.
Monthly Archives: November 2016
Modern Monetary Theory is Relevant to More than Just Capitalism
Viewed from a certain vantage point, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is a very general framework that offers insight into how we might go about making genuine social progress. It does not simply facilitate an understanding of capitalism, but points to a way of transcending the present system. It enables insight into the opportunities available to any society that forms for itself a government and operates a monetary economy.
The Preferred Policy Instruments of Functional Finance
In a recent post, JW Mason draws an insightful comparison:
Conventional policy and functional finance represent two different choices about which instrument to assign to which target. The former says the interest rate instrument should focus on demand and the fiscal-balance instrument should focus on the debt-ratio target, the latter has them the other way around. … In this sense, the functional finance position is less radical than either its supporters or its opponents believe.
Scott Fullwiler has explained (for example, in this five-part series) that functional finance, far from being reckless or radical if assessed on orthodox criteria, turns out to be “ricardian” as that term is employed by the mainstream. So, the leading Modern Monetary Theorists would likely agree that functional finance is not radical in this sense. What is “radical” – for want of a better word – is that functional finance, like much of currently heterodox macroeconomics, turns the current conventional wisdom on its head.
Competition, for Marx, was Not Neoclassical Perfect Competition
Sometimes the view is expressed that Marx’s theory, while perhaps applying to an earlier, competitive version of capitalism, has little relevance to the era of ‘monopoly capitalism’ in which we supposedly live today. This view seems to result from mistaking ‘competition’ in Marx – and classical political economy, more generally – with neoclassical ‘perfect competition’.
Investment Creates Saving
In explaining why it is investment that creates saving, and not the other way around, different economists have offered different ways of looking at the matter. Keynes (see previous posts here and here) distinguished planned (ex ante) from actual (ex post) investment and saving to note the way in which planned saving adjusts to planned investment via changes in income. Kalecki (discussed previously here) emphasized the initiating role of decision making. Firms can decide how much to invest, but not how much profit they will make, because profit depends on the spending decisions of others. Post Keynesian analysis of institutions and monetary operations suggests an explanation summed up with characteristic insight and clarity by Warren Mosler in the short video embedded below. The purpose of the present post is just to flesh out the explanation a little and highlight a few of its implications.