Paul Davidson (economist)

Paul Davidson ( born October 23, 1930 in New York City ) is an American economist. He is considered one of the leading representatives of the Postkeynesianismus in the United States.

Life

Davidson grew up in Brooklyn. He came to economics, only after he was graduated in chemistry and biology at Brooklyn College. At the University of Pennsylvania, he has done research in biochemistry, intending to do a doctorate on DNA. Then, however, he had radically changed course and made ​​with a thesis entitled The Statistical Analysis of Economic Time Series MBA. He then returned to the University of Pennsylvania to study at Sidney Weintraub. From this is his interest in macroeconomics in the light of JM Keynes and to the issues of income distribution. With his dissertation Theories of Relative Shares he has 1959 Ph.D. stored in economics.

1952 married Davidson. After a short period of academic teaching, he spent a year as Assistant Director of the Economics Division of the Standard Oil Company, after which he returned to the University of Pennsylvania. In 1966 he moved to Rutgers University, where he taught for twenty years. In 1986, he took over the Holly Chair of Excellence in Political Economy at the University of Tennessee.

Along with Sidney Weintraub he founded the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics ( JPKE ). He has held the editor in 1978 (up to Weintraub's death in 1983 co-editor ).

Theoretical Approach

What constitutes " Keynesianism " was coined in the United States primarily by Paul A. Samuelson and John R. Hicks, who made the economist John Maynard Keynes academically acceptable by an adaptation of the neoclassical theory. According to Davidson this, however, the concerns of the General Theory, a fundamental theoretical alternative was to develop " classical theory " completely disregarded. Here Keynes attributed statements that he had never made such that involuntary unemployment through labor market rigidities could be explained or by a liquidity trap. Davidson explains this misunderstanding of the original Keynes from the history of science, namely by Samuelson Keynes had met through Robert Bryce, who had visited Keynes ' lectures at Cambridge before he had written his General Theory. Bryce went on to Harvard, and his image of Keynes was that the local economists.

According to Keynes ' peculiar monetary theory approach is for the current economy an important basic fact that contracts contain demands for money, and that every agent must see that it always remains liquid, in order to survive, so that it can meet the costs incurred during the period monetary claims.

In his Foundations of Economic Analysis ( 1947), Samuelson has resumed two axioms of the classical theory, the neutrality of money and the Substitutionstheorem ( gross substitution axiom ), according to which each real product, which yields a positive return is able to replace money. By Samuelson promoted his version of Keynesianism, he simultaneously asserts these axioms as a basis of economic theory, although this had Keynes explicitly rejected in his writings.

In his critique of mainstream economics Davidson has therefore identified three axioms, while he concentrated his theory criticism.

  • Axiom of substitutability ( axiom of substitutability ): This axiom holds the Say's Law upright and denies the possibility of involuntary unemployment.
  • Axiom of the real economy ( axiom of reals ): The neutrality of money is assumed; that is, the "money veil " has no meaning. Real economic decisions based on relative prices, income effects are always turned off by substitution effects.
  • Axiom of ergodicity ( axiom of ergodicity ): The future is seen under the assumption of statistical probability, but not under a fundamental uncertainty.

Publications

  • Theories of Aggregate Income Distribution. Rutgers University Press, 1960
  • With Eugene Smolensky: Aggregate Supply and Demand Analysis. Harper & Row, 1964
  • Money and the Real World. Macmillan, 1972
  • International Money and the Real World. Macmillan, 1982
  • Greg Davidson: Economics for a Civilized Society. Norton, 1988
  • The Collected Writings of Paul Davidson. Palgrave Macmillan Volume 1: Money and Employment. 1990
  • Volume 2: Inflation, Open Economies, and Resources. 1991
  • Volume 3: Uncertainty, International Money, Employment and Theory. 1999
  • Volume 4: Interpreting Keynes for the 21st Century. 2007
  • Reviews of Paul Davidson 's new book in the Real-World Economics Review Blog 24 November, 2009
  • What would Keynes do today? As we come to global prosperity. Stock market book publishing, Kulmbach 2011, ISBN 978-3-942888-48-6
  • Act Now! The global manifesto for saving the economy. Westend, Frankfurt, 2013, ISBN 978-3-86489-034-5
Master of Business Administration Paul Samuelson Harvard University James K. Galbraith Richard Koo Integrated Authority File
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