Written by John Lounsbury
One of the world’s leading economic historians and classical theorists, Michael Hudson, has a personal history that is more complex than one would find in a novel by James Joyce, William Faulkner, or Leon Tolstoy. This week we have a most unique monologue by Dr. Hudson recounting his unusual experiences from childhood up to his recent years and how his thinking as an economist was formed and changed over the years.
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This video was brought to my attention by Prof. Steve Keen with a post on his Patreon website. From that page:
As well as being one of my most significant intellectual colleagues, Michael is also a close friend. His life is remarkable, as he is himself, all the more so because he is so down to earth, despite the weirdly rarified life he has led.
There are very few people who can spout the names of Leon Trotksy, Hyman Minsky, and David Rockefeller, and not be speaking book-talk, but actually talking about people he has met and interacted with.
You’ll learn a lot about economics, politics, history and sociology simply by listening to this one hour monologue, which was recorded in April of 2019.
From Wikipedia:
Michael Hudson (born March 14, 1939) is an American economist, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri – Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator and journalist.
Hudson graduated from the University of Chicago (B.A., 1959) and New York University (MA, 1965, PhD, 1968) and worked as a balance of payment economist in Chase Manhattan Bank (1964 – 1968). He was assistant professor of economics at the New School for Social Research (1969 – 1972) and worked for various governmental and non-governmental organizations as an economic consultant (1980s – 1990s). [2]
Hudson has extensively studied economic theories of many schools, including Physiocracy, classical political economy (Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx, among others), neoclassical, Keynesian, post-Keynesian, Modern Monetary Theory and many others. He identifies himself as a classical economist. His interpretation of Marx is almost unique to him and differs from major Marxists.
Hudson devoted his entire scientific career to the study of debt, both domestic (loans, mortgages and interest payments) and external. In his works, he consistently advocates the idea that loans and exponentially growing debts that outstrip profits from the economy of the real sphere are disastrous for both the government and the people of the borrowing state as they wash money (going to payments to usurers and rentiers) from turnover, not leaving them to buy goods and services and thus lead to debt deflation of the economy. Hudson notes that the existing economic theory (the Chicago School in particular) is in the service of rentiers and financiers and has developed a special language designed to create the impression that the current status quo has no alternative. In a false theory, the parasitic encumbrances of a real economy, instead of being deducted in accounting, add up as an addition to the gross domestic product and are presented as productive. Hudson sees consumer protection, state support of infrastructure projects and taxation of parasitic rentier sectors of the economy instead of taxing workers as a continuation of the line of classical economists today.
This video is just over an hour (1:05). Watch it when you have an hour blocked out. You will not want to stop once you have started.
Source: YouTube
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