Written by John Lounsbury
Prof. Marc Lavoie is the author of a 2014 textbook Post Keynesian Economics; New Foundations. The approach of this textbook is discussed in an interview of Prof. Lavoie by Marshall Auerback of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
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From Wikipedia:
Marc Lavoie (born 1954)[1] is a Canadian professor in economics at the University of Ottawa and a former Olympic fencing athlete.
Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Marc Lavoie is a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Ottawa, where he started teaching in 1979. He got his doctorate from the University of Paris-1. Besides having published nearly two hundred articles in refereed journals, he has written a number of books, among which are Post-Keynesian Economics: New Foundations (2014), Introduction to Post-Keynesian Economics (2006), translated into four languages, Foundations of Post-Keynesian Economic Analysis (1992), as well as Monetary Economics: An Integrated Approach to Money, Income, Production and Wealth (2007) with Wynne Godley. The latter deals with and employs in its analysis the stock/flow consistent method.
With Mario Seccareccia, he has been the co-editor of three books, including one on the works of Milton Friedman, in addition to writing the first Canadian edition of the Baumol and Blinder first-year textbook (2009).
Lavoie has been the associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Political Economy (1999), and he has been a visiting professor at the universities of Bordeaux, Nice, Rennes, Dijon, Grenoble, Limoges, Lille, Paris-1 and Paris-Nord, as well as Curtin University in Perth, Australia.
Lavoie is also an IMK Research Fellow at the Hans Böckler Foundation in Düsselforf and Policy Fellow at the Broadbent Institute in Toronto. He has lectured at post-Keynesian summer schools in Kansas City, the Levy Economics Institute and Berlin.[2]
From YouTube:
Mainstream economic theory has been increasingly questioned following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. The disconnect between reality and theory manifested itself most clearly when the Queen of the United Kingdom pointedly asked why no economist saw this coming. In truth, there were a handful who did get it right, but they were generally ignored in favour of Ivy League educated neo-classical economists, whose assumptions proved incapable of integrating the financial and real sides of the economy.
This is a problem which extends all the way to the classroom, which is why Marc Lavoie, a professor of economics at the University of Ottawa, wrote a new economic textbook as a coherent substitute to conventional textbooks. The book, “Post Keynesian Economics; New Foundations”, outlines alternative macro and microeconomic foundations, the upshot being a book that acknowledges that we live in a world of fundamental uncertainty, where the role of finance goes well beyond the simplistic reserve banking models that populate most undergraduate studies.
In this interview, Lavoie discusses the methodological foundations of heterodox economics, and offers a very different model of money and credit, firms and pricing, consumer theory, effective demand and employment and growth theories. As Lavoie himself argues, economists essentially had 3 reactions to the recent financial crisis.
The first group has been to say that existing mainstream theory is fine, but that it needs to be slightly tweaked and improved so as to take into account elements that were previously left aside and which explain why the crisis could not be predicted.
The second group, the so-called “freshwater economists” argue that the crisis was caused by misguided regulations, bad government interventions, ill-advised decisions by central banks, public profligacy and unsound fiscal policy.
The third camp (to which Lavoie belongs and which forms the basis of the books prevailing theme) is to claim that recent institutions, regulations, and economic policies have been based on erroneous economic theories, and that these need to be eliminated, starting with the way we teach economics – hence the rationale for the new textbook.
Source: YouTube
For a longer 2019 lecture by Prof. Laboie, see Marc Lavoie History and fundamentals of Post Keynesian Macroeconomics (YouTube):
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