Barkley Rosser — It's Monday, So "Silent Samuelson" Wants To Cut Social Security Benefits (Yet Again)

Wherein Barkley Rosser roasts Robert Samuelson.

"Silent" refers to the Silent Generation that preceded the Baby Boomers.

Econospeak
It's Monday, So "Silent Samuelson" Wants To Cut Social Security Benefits (Yet Again)
J. Barkley Rosser | Professor of Economics and Business Administration James Madison University

Dean Baker — Income Growth is Not Quite What Robert Samuelson Implies

However his column is somewhat misleading on the income gains over the last three decades for families at the middle and bottom of the income distribution. For those at the bottom, much of the 50 percent gain in income since 1979 is due to the increasing cost of Medicare and Medicaid. The measure being used refers to the amount the government pays for these programs. Using methodology, every time a heart surgeon raises her fees or Pfizer raises the price of its drugs the income of the poor rises. If we just treated health care as a service and priced it at its per person cost in the average wealthy country, the income gain for those at the bottom would be much smaller. 

Much of the 40 percent gain in incomes for families in the middle is the result of an increase in the number of workers per family. In 1979 there were still many two parent families in which the women did not work outside the home. Such families are rare today.

CEPR
Income Growth is Not Quite What Robert Samuelson Implies
Dean Baker

J. Barkley Rosser — Paul Krugman Really Blows It

It is in his parenthetical aside, that "you shouldn't" think that Robinson and Kaldor (who was not one of the main participants in that debate from the Cambridge, UK side, and I say that as one who has recently been labeled a "Kaldorian") were right in the debate. The problem is that Paul Samuelson agreed that in fact Robinson and Piero Sraffa (and Garegnani and Pasinetti) were in fact right. The possibility of reswitching does undermine profoundly the marginal productivity theory of factor income distribution, especially for capital. He did so in his "Summing Up" paper after the symposium on reswitching in the QJE in 1966. His final sentence of that paper, after going through the arguments in several papers was "The foundations of economic theory are built on sand."

Krugman makes a lot of good points, but he really needs to get it together about what went down during the Cambridge capital theory controversies. Robinson and Sraffa were right, and Paul Samuelson said so. Period.

Smacking down the revisionists.

Econospeak
Paul Krugman Really Blows It
J. Barkley Rosser | Professor of Economics at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia

David Ruccio — The dreaded “C” word—again

The unevenness of the current economic recovery is so obvious even mainstream economists have been forced to invoke the dreaded “c” word: class.
As I’ve pointed out many times on this blog, the more mainstream economists try to deny the relevance of class—after the crash of 2007-08, in the midst of the Second Great Depression—the more it rears its ugly head. 

And so we have the spectacle of even the most vulgar of economists, such as Robert Samuelson, finding themselves in the position where they can’t ignore it. They really hoped the trend for labor’s share of national income to decline and capital’s share to rise would be reversed. But it didn’t. Not by a longshot.

Now, it’s true, mainstream economists like Samuelson have no idea why the two class shares are moving in opposite directions. But they do know that, as things continue in this direction, there are going to be real problems in terms of the fundamental unevenness and injustice of this recovery, and thus of the legitimacy of the current way of organizing economic and social life. That’s why they’re begging capital to do something about it

Real World Economics Review Blog
The dreaded “C” word—again
David Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Paul Krugman excoriates Robert Samuelson for "mystical thinking"

 What’s really going on here, as far as I can tell, is a modern version of the 18th century physiocratic notion that only agriculture is real, that everything else is fluff on top. And we really shouldn’t be seeing a rebirth of that sort of nonsense in the 21st century. If you believe that we should have fewer schoolteachers and firefighters — or that education should be privatized — make that case. Don’t try to hide your prejudices under a mystical doctrine in which important, productive jobs somehow don’t count if they come from a place with a .gov email address.

The New York Times | The Conscience of a Liberal
The New Physiocrats
Paul Krugman | Professor of Economics, Princeton University

A deft thrust to the heart. While we may disagree with Professor Krugman over some aspects of monetary economics, he is a master of the take-down.