Macroeconomics is in disarray. No one approach is dominant, and an increasing divide between theory and empirics is evident. This book presents both a critique of mainstream macroeconomics from a structuralist perspective and an exposition of modern structuralist approaches. The fundamental assumption of structuralism is that it is impossible to understand a macroeconomy without understanding its major institutions and distributive relationships across productive sectors and social groups. Lance Taylor focuses his critique on mainstream monetarist, new classical, new Keynesian, and growth models. He examines them from a historical perspective, tracing monetarism from its eighteenth-century roots and comparing current monetarist and new classical models with those of the post-Wicksellian, pre-Keynesian generation of macroeconomists. He contrasts the new Keynesian vision with Keynes's General Theory, and analyzes contemporary growth theories against long traditions of thought about economic development and structural change. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Social Accounts and Social Relations 1. A Simple Social Accounting Matrix 2. Implications of the Accounts 3. Disaggregating Effective Demand 4. A More Realistic SAM 5. Stock-Flow Relationships 6. A SAM and Asset Accounts for the United States 7. Further Thoughts 2. Prices and Distribution 1. Classical Macroeconomics 2. Classical Theories of Price and Distribution 3. Neoclassical Cost-Based Prices 4. Hat Calculus, Measuring Productivity Growth, and Full Employment Equilibrium 5. Mark-up Pricing in the Product Market 6. Efficiency Wages for Labor 7. New Keynesian Crosses and Methodological Reservations 8. First Looks at Inflation 3. Money, Interest, and Inflation 1. Money and Credit 2. Diverse Interest Theories 3. Interest Rate Cost-Push 4. Real Interest Rate Theory 5. The Ramsey Model 6. Dynamics on a Flying Trapeze 7. The Overlapping Generations Growth Model 8. Wicksell's Cumulative Process Inflation Model 9. More on Inflation Taxes 4. Effective Demand and Its Real and Financial Implications 1. The Commodity Market 2. Macro Adjustment via Forced Saving and Real Balance Effects 3. Real Balances, Input Substitution, and Money Wage Cuts 4. Liquidity Preference and Marginal Efficiency of Capital 5. Liquidity Preference, Fisher Arbitrage, and the Liquidity Trap 6. The System as a Whole 7. The IS/LM Model 8. Keynes and Friends on Financial Markets 9. Financial Markets and Investment 10. Consumption and Saving 11 "Disequilibrium" Macroeconomics 12. A Structuralist Synopsis 5. Short-Term Model Closure and Long-Term Growth 1. Model "Closures" in the Short Run 2. Graphical Representations and Supply-Driven Growth 3. Harrod, Robinson, and Related Stories 4. More Stable Demand-Determined Growth 6. Chicago Monetarism, New Classical Macroeconomics, and Mainstream Finance 1. Methodological Caveats 2. A Chicago Monetarist Model 3. A Cleaner Version of Monetarism 4. New Classical Spins 5. Dynamics of Government Debt 6. Ricardian Equivalence 7. The Business Cycle Conundrum 8. Cycles from the Supply Side 9. Optimal Behavior under Risk 10. Random Walk, Equity Premium, and the Modigliani-Miller Theorem 11. More on Modigliani-Miller 12. The Calculation Debate and Super-Rational Economics 7. Effective Demand and the Distributive Curve 1. Initial Observations 2. Inflation, Productivity Growth, and Distribution 3. Absorbing Productivity Growth 4. Effects of Expansionary Policy 5. Financial Extensions 6. Dynamics of the System 7. Comparative Dynamics 8. Open Economy Complications 8. Structuralist Finance and Money 1. Banking History and Institutions 2. Endogenous Finance 3. Endogenous Money via Bank Lending 4. Money Market Funds and the Level of Interest Rates 5. Business Debt and Growth in a Post-Keynesian World 6. New Keynesian Approaches to Financial Markets 9. A Genus of Cycles 1. Goodwin's Model 2. A Structuralist Goodwin Model 3. Evidence for the United States 4. A Contractionary Devaluation Cycle 5. An Inflation Expectations Cycle 6. Confidence and Multiplier 7. Minsky on Financial Cycles 8. Excess Capacity, Corporate Debt Burden, and a Cold Douche 9. Final Thoughts 10. Exchange Rate Complications 1. Accounting Conundrums 2. Determining Exchange Rates 3. Asset Prices, Expectations, and Exchange Rates 4. Commodity Arbitrage and Purchasing Power Parity 5. Portfolio Balance 6. Mundell-Fleming 7. IS/LM Comparative Statics 8. UIP and Dynamics 9. Open Economy Monetarism 10. Dornbusch 11. Other Theories of the Exchange Rate 12. A Developing Country Debt Cycle 13. Fencing in the Beast 11. Growth and Development Theories 1. New Growth Theories and Say's Law 2. Distribution and Growth 3. Models with Binding Resource or Sectoral Supply Constraints 4. Accounting for Growth 5. Other Perspectives 6. The Mainstream Policy Response 7. Where Theory Might Sensibly Go References Index Reconstructing Macroeconomics is a stunning intellectual achievement. It surveys an astonishing range of macroeconomic problems and approaches in a compact, coherent critical framework with unfailing depth, wit, and subtlety. Lance Taylor's pathbreaking work in structural macroeconomics and econometrics sets challenging standards of rigor, realism, and insight for the field. Taylor shows why the structuralist and Keynesian insistence on putting accounting consistency, income distribution, and aggregate demand at the center of macroeconomic analysis is indispensable to understanding real-world macroeconomic events in both developing and developed economies. The book is full of new results, modeling techniques, and shrewd suggestions for further research. Taylor's scrupulous and balanced appraisal of the whole range of macroeconomic schools of thought will be a source of new perspectives to macroeconomists of every persuasion. --Duncan K. Foley, New School University Lance Taylor has produced a masterful and comprehensive critical survey of existing macro models, both mainstream and structuralist, which breaks considerable new ground. The pace is brisk, the level is high, and the writing is entertaining. The author's sense of humor and literary references enliven the discussion of otherwise arcane and technical, but extremely important, issues in macro theory. This book is sure to become a standard reference that future generations of macroeconomists will refer to for decades to come. --Robert Blecker, American University While there are other books dealing with heterodox macroeconomics, this book surpasses them all in the quality of its presentation and in the careful treatment and criticism of orthodox macroeconomics including its recent contributions. The book is unique in the way it systematically covers heterodox growth theory and its relations to other aspects of heterodox macroeconomics using a common organizing framework in terms of accounting relations, and in the way it compares the theories with mainstream contributions. Another positive and novel feature of the book is that it takes a long view of the development of economic ideas, which leads to a more accurate appreciation of the real contributions by recent theoretical developments than is possible in a presentation that ignores the history of macroeconomics. --Amitava Dutt, University of Notre Dame

This book carves the beginnings of a new path in the arguably weary discipline of economics. It combines a variety of perspectives – from the history of ideas to epistemology – in order to try to understand what has gone so wrong with economics and articulate a coherent way forward. This is undertaken through a dual path of deconstruction and reconstruction. Mainstream economics is broken down into many of its key component parts and the history of each of these parts is scrutinized closely. When the flaws are thoroughly understood the author then begins the task of reconstruction. What emerges is not a ‘Grand Unified Theory of Everything’, but rather a provisional map outlining a new terrain for economists to explore. The Reformation in Economics is written in a lively and engaging style that aims less at the formalization of dogma and more at the exploration of ideas. This truly groundbreaking work invites readers to rethink their current understanding of economics as a discipline and is particularly relevant for those interested in economic pluralism and alternative economics.

This book explains how standard micro-founded macroeconomics is misguided and proposes an alternative method based on statistical physics. The Great Recession following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2015 amply demonstrated that mainstream micro-founded macroeconomics was in trouble. The new approach advanced in this book reasonably explains important macro-problems such as employment, business cycles, growth, and inflation/deflation. The key concept is demand failures, which modern micro-founded macroeconomics has ignored. "It (Chapter 3) captures analytically a good part of the intuition that underlies the Keynesian economics of people like Tobin and me." Robert Solow, Emeritus Institute Professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 1987 "Professor Hiroshi Yoshikawa provides a unique synthesis of statistical physics and macro-economic theory in order to confront the dismal failure in economics and in finance to understand how an economy or a financial market works, given the heterogeneous decision making of many different individual interacting actors. Economics has failed in this regard with the naive and often misleading concept of "representative agents." The author presents many insights on the historical development, concepts, and errors made by the most illustrious economists in the past. This book should be essential readings for any economics students as well as academic researchers and policy makers, who should learn to bring back good-sense thinking in their impactful decisions." Didier Sornette, Professor on the Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich).

A proposal that the notion of specificity -- the idea that factors of production are not interchangeable -- can provide a unified framework to analyze and understand a wide variety of macroeconomic phenomena stemming from the transactional environment and microeconomic restructuring. The core mechanism that drives economic growth in modern market economies is massive microeconomic restructuring and factor reallocation -- the Schumpeterian "creative destruction" by which new technologies replace the old. At the microeconomic level, restructuring is characterized by countless decisions to create and destroy production arrangements. The efficiency of these decisions depends in large part on the existence of sound institutions that provide a proper transactional environment. In this groundbreaking book, Ricardo Caballero proposes a unified framework to analyze and understand a wide variety of macroeconomic phenomena stemming from limitations, especially institutional, that hinder these adjustments. Caballero argues that macroeconomic models need to be made more "structural" in a precise sense and can not be maintained on the assumption that decisions are fully flexible. What is needed, he proposes, is the notion of specificity -- the idea that factors of production are not freely interchangeable. Many of the major macroeconomic developments of recent decades, he argues, fit naturally into this perspective, including the transition problems of Eastern Europe, the heavy weight of labor regulations in Western Europe, the emerging market crises of the 1990s, the prolonged expansion of the U.S. economy, and Japan's stagnation following the collapse of its real estate bubble. After describing the basic arguments of the book and developing models to illustrate two different kinds of specificity (relationship specificity and technological specificity), Caballero analyzes a variety of aspects of inefficient restructuring and revisits perennial business cycle patterns such as the cyclical behavior of unemployment, investment, and wages. Finally, he looks at the endogenous response of political institutions and technology to opportunistic exploitation of relationship specificity. Economists working on macroeconomics, development, growth, labor, and productivity issues will find Caballero's conceptual framework applicable to phenomena in their fields.