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What does it mean to be a left wing economist today? |
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Page 20 of 38
Von Hayek proved less than he asserted. He proved, analyzing in detail the cases of Hitler and Stalin, that some political and economic changes away from capitalism and toward socialism make society worse instead of better. He asserted that all political changes away from capitalism and toward socialism make society worse instead of better.
Already in 1920, and subsequently in later elaborations and restatements, Ludwig von Mises articulated the terms of debates that still continue. He claimed, in effect, that any socializing movement away from the dominant Roman Law paradigm would lead to irrationality, which was the same thing as inefficiency. It would also lead to the weakening of incentives, and toward, if not to, tyranny. Subsequently, left wing economists encountered new challenges in addition to ongoing ones like those articulated by von Mises and von Hayek: the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Keynesian Revolution, the rise of the Welfare State in Western Europe, the rise of the Warfare State in America, the rise of development economics in the third world. Michael Kalecki had important things to say about all of these new challenges. Born in 1899, he was a self-educated Pole. He read Rosa Luxemburg in his youth. He immigrated first to Sweden and then to Cambridge where he became a member of the Post-Keynesian inner circle. He spent the years 1945-1955 working for the United Nations, first for the International Labor Organization in Montreal, and then at UN Headquarters in New York, before returning to his native Poland where he worked for its Communist government. In 1970 he resigned his official posts in protest against official persecution of colleagues and against anti-Semitism.
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