Macro-Economics in Question The Keynesian-Monetarist Orthodoxies and the Kaleckian Alternative

Originally published in 1982, this book has two central purposes. The first is to present a rather more critical view of the Keynesian and monetarist approaches to macro-economics than is usually found in major macro-economics text-books. The second is to present an alternative approach to macro-economics, derived in the main from the work of Michal Kalecki. It will become apparent below that the major difference between the conventional approaches to macro-economics and the Kaleckian one arises from a basic difference over the nature of a modern capitalist economy. The conventional approaches rest on a perfectly competitive view of the world whilst the Kalecki approach draws on an oligopolistic view. The book has been written to be accessible to undergraduate students of economics who have taken a basic second-year degree level course in macro-economics (as represented by text-books such as Branson, 1979; Gordon, 1981). Particularly in Chapters 2-4 a knowledge of conventional macro-economics is required. References are provided in the text and in footnotes for those wishing to pursue particular topics further. The book also contains much of interest for professional economists.