Status Updates From Revisiting Keynes: Economic...

Keynes's immediate translation of higher aggregate affluence into social prosperity falls into the typical shortcut of assuming the existence of a benevolent planner doing that job. What is actually happening today is that the traditional system of checks and balances, which was typically performing the task of reconciling economic development with social justice in the past, is in a state of crisis.

Each and every economist should try to answer the question of the ends of the economic system and of its possible end. Maybe this would lead them to consider their discipline differently.

By placing the desire to outdo others at the heart of his description of the category of goods whose demands are shaped by context, Keynes confined that category to the periphery. But the demand for quality is simply not limited in this way.

In their Veblenesque world Americans have come to take as necessities what those elsewhere have taken as luxuries.