Let me again mention my book on Classical Economics and the Modern Economy the review of which I discussed here. It is not all that unusual that an author should be fond of a book he has written, so you will have to forgive me having written the following to a colleague who has also written a positive review of the book somewhere else. This is what I wrote:

It was indeed a phenomenal review. But then I wrote to someone else, as a joke, that it has made me want to read the book myself, which in fact is what I have now begun to do and am half way through. And while you may feel he has provided a more in-depth understanding, and undoubtedly he has, yours was as on-the-mark as any I could have hoped for.

In re-reading what I sent to the publisher more than a year ago, and possibly finished the copy editing process at least a year ago, I am amazed how well it has come out. It says everything I even now would want to say and it says it as clearly as I am capable of saying it. I found one gremlin (and they were always going to be there), but there is nothing I wish I had added and there were a number of surprises where I had said something I had forgotten I had even included.

But what reading the text made me realise even more than before, no one else, certainly no one else alive today, will ever see what the book is saying. It will perhaps be in fifty years when some library goes about selling off its discarded texts that someone might pick it up and read it then and really see the point, in the same ways as I saw Mill’s point 150 years after his Principles was published in 1848.

But for almost anyone alive today, I am much too obscure and no one will ever take my word for it against the massive edifice of modern theory. For all that, I have just read the small bit on productive vs unproductive consumption and have marvelled again at how such a perspective has evaporated entirely from the body of economic theory. It is not only obvious, but essential.

And then this came up which you would have to understand economic theory in an entirely different way from what you see in the textbooks to see just how stupid this is: V.P. Biden ’09: ‘We Have to Go Spend Money to Keep From Going Bankrupt’.

On Wednesday, Democrats passed a $3.5 trillion budget resolution and, with the help of 19 Republicans, a $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” bill.

According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the total public debt outstanding as of Aug. 9, 2021, was $28,427,651,083,061.54, or roughly $28.4 trillion.

How this will prevent the US from going bankrupt we will now all live to see for ourselves.

Economics for Infants – full text with illustrations (1)

Available for sale here.

And here is my recommendation.

If you have friends who like the way a market economy works, and who are leery of governments, buy a copy for their children. Their parents will enjoy the book as much as their children, who will learn things they would not otherwise find out so early in life.

However, for parents of a contrary disposition, buy the book for their children, as above, but never expect the book to be passed on to their children, and certainly not read to them. You will just have to content yourself with knowing the parents have read the book and then had a meltdown before throwing it on the compost heap, or hopefully passing it on to the local op-shop where someone else will buy it.

Modern economic theory is complete trash, as I have noted before, but which is now also discussed here: Dismal Economics.

Although neoclassical economics relies on assumptions that should have been discarded long ago, it remains the mainstream orthodoxy. Three recent books, and one older one, help to show why its staying power should be regarded as a scandal.

• Mason Gaffney and Fred Harrison, The Corruption of Economics, Shepheard-Walwyn Publishers Ltd., 2006 (first published 1994).
  Stephen A. Marglin, Raising Keynes: A Twenty-First-Century General Theory, Harvard University Press, 2021.
  Alessandro Roncaglia, The Age of Fragmentation: A History of Contemporary Economic Thought, Cambridge University Press, 2019.
  Robert Skidelsky, What’s Wrong with Economics?: A Primer for the Perplexed, Yale University Press, 2020.

Let me therefore mention my own book that deals with this ongoing scandal, a book which is now available as a paperback: Classical Economic Theory and the Modern Economy. This is the short description at the link:

Economic theory reached its zenith of analytical power and depth of understanding in the middle of the nineteenth century among John Stuart Mill and his contemporaries. This book explains what took place in the ensuing Marginal Revolution and Keynesian Revolution that left economists less able to understand how economies operate. It explores the false mythology that has obscured the arguments of classical economists, providing a pathway into the theory they developed.

Modern economic theory provides no obstacle to any of the inanities that pass for public economic policy at the present time. If anything, vast oceans of public sector debt and huge increases in the stock of money are seen as in keeping with modern theory, which they largely are.