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Who’s Afraid of Michał Kalecki?
Why is one of the most significant economic theorists ‘ever’ completely missing from US education? If an analogy from physics can be drawn. It would be as if Heisenberg’s contribution to quantum mechanics, his uncertainty principle, and matrix mechanics were all completely expunged from all undergraduate textbooks and you only learned about Schrödinger’s equation.
Those of you who might fancy yourself as slightly educated in economics probably know about Adam Smith and his “invisible hand” of the market, or John Maynard Keynes, the importance of government spending and so-called “Keynesian” economics. You might even be aware of Milton Friedman and his “supply side” economics as the theoretical underpinnings of Regan’s economic policies during the 1980’s. Yet I doubt many of you have heard of Michal Kalecki unless you are a practicing economist or have studied more than an average amount of economic theory. Yet his ideas are central to the big economic questions we are facing presently. For example, does the Federal Reserve really need to raise interest rates so dramatically to control inflation? Is forcing people out of work to “discipline Labor” really what is best for all? Or does it just further drive the growing asymmetry in wealth distribution?
Embarrassingly I had never heard of Kalecki until only a few months ago and I did fancy myself as fairly…
