文档介绍：Classical Macroeconomics
Macroeconomics is easily the most unsettled area of modern economics.
Conflicting explanations abound over why interest rates or prices on average rise
or fall. Dispute continues over whether government tax policies should encourage
consumer spending or saving. Similarly, it is unsettled whether government
spending should be a principal instrument of economic growth promotion or
rather be limited to the minimal role of national defence, the administration of
justice, including the protection of private property and enforcement of contracts,
and the enactment of laws to mercial enterprise.
The classical economists, especially Adam Smith, David Ricardo, J.-,
and , provided clarifications as well as answers to the above questions,
which Alfred Marshall carried into the twentieth century. However, failing to
interpret correctly economic concepts as employed by the classical economists,
John Maynard Keynes dismissed the classical explanations and conclusions as
being irrelevant to the world in which we live. The trauma of the Great Depression
and Keynes’s changed definition of economic concepts, aided by the work of
Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, have made it difficult for modern economists to fully
appreciate the classical insights. This book clarifies the classical explanations to
help resolve the continuing theoretical and policy disputes. Key chapters include:
• On the definition of money
• Keynes’s misinterpretation of the classical theory of interest
• The classical theory of growth and Keynes’s paradox of thrift
• The mythology of the Keynesian multiplier.
Professor James teaches economics at the California State
University, Hayward, and was Department Chair, 1994–2000. His restatements
of classical macroeconomics have appeared in the History of Political Economy, Southern
Economic Journal, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, American Journal of Economics
and Sociology and Independent Revie