Market stability: backward‐bending supply in a laboratory experimental market. 1999 Presidential address Western Economic Association

2000 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
CR Plott
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Address ◽  
Market Stability ◽  
Economic Association ◽  
Experimental Market

scholarly journals The wrong track also leads someplace: Milton Friedman's presidential address at 50

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-532 ◽  
Author(s):  
Servaas Storm
Keyword(s):  
Phillips Curve ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Aggregate Demand ◽  
Financial Fragility ◽  
American Economic Association ◽  
Structural Forces ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Economic Association ◽  
The Right ◽  
Do So

Milton Friedman's presidential address to the American Economic Association holds a mythical status as the harbinger of the supply-side counter-revolution in macroeconomics – centred on the rejection of the long-run Phillips-curve inflation–unemployment trade-off. Friedman (seconded by Edmund Phelps) argued that the long run is determined by ‘structural’ forces, not demand, and his view swept the profession and dominated academic economics and macro policymaking for four decades. Friedman, tragically, put macroeconomics on the wrong track which led to disaster: secular stagnation, rising inequality, mounting indebtedness, financial fragility, a banking catastrophe and recession – and no free lunches. This is Friedman's legacy. We have to unlearn the wrong lessons and return macroeconomics to the right track. To do so, this paper shows that Friedman's (and Phelps's) conclusions break down in a general model of the long run in which productivity growth is endogenous – aggregate demand is driving everything again, short and long.

scholarly journals A NEGLECTED INCONSISTENCY IN MILTON FRIEDMAN’S AEA PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Forder
Keyword(s):  
Phillips Curve ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
American Economic Association ◽  
Milton Friedman ◽  
Economic Association

Milton Friedman (1968)—his famous Presidential Address to the American Economic Association—contains an elementary error right at the heart of what is usually supposed to be the paper’s crucial argument. That is the argument to the effect that during an inflation, changing expectations shift the Phillips curve. It is suggested that the fact of this mistake and of its having gone all but unnoticed are points of historical interest. Further reflections, drawing on the arguments of Forder (2014), Macroeconomics and the Phillips Curve Myth, are suggested.

The role of financial policy

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 446-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger E.A. Farmer
Keyword(s):  
Financial Markets ◽  
Economic Activity ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Central Banking ◽  
Financial Policy ◽  
American Economic Association ◽  
General Equilibrium Theory ◽  
Economic Association ◽  
Monetary Rules

I review the contribution and influence of Milton Friedman's 1968 presidential address to the American Economic Association. I argue that Friedman's influence on the practice of central banking was profound and that his arguments in favour of monetary rules were responsible for 30 years of low and stable inflation in the period from 1979 through 2009. I present a critique of Friedman's position that market economies are self-stabilizing and I describe an alternative reconciliation of Keynesian economics with Walrasian general equilibrium theory from that which is widely accepted today by most neoclassical economists. My interpretation implies that government should intervene actively in financial markets to stabilize economic activity.

Malthus's Vision of the Population Problem in the Essay on Population

1990 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Hollander
Keyword(s):  
Population Growth ◽  
Population Size ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Preventive Check ◽  
Economic Association ◽  
Gary Becker ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Stability

In his Presidential address to the American Economic Association, Gary Becker alludes to Thomas Malthus's “great contribution” (1988, p. 1) in a prologue to a wider exploratory discussion of some of the implications for macroeconomics flowing from recent programs in family economics. The content of the contribution as represented here (p. 2) includes diminishing returns to increases in employment “when land and other capital are fixed;” population growth positively related to the wage, the lower population growth at low wages turning on reduced birth rates (the preventive check) and increased death rates (the positive check); and a long-run equilibrium wage at which population is constant at a level determined by the production function. Becker emphasizes the stability of the equilibrium wage in the face of disturbances. A catastrophic reduction in population size (eg. the Black Death) and consequently a wage increase will be followed by positive population growth which restores both the wage and population size to their respective equilibrium levels. In the event of increases in the amount of usuable land, population size will become permanently higher with the wage ultimately reduced to its original long-run level. Becker represents Malthus as reaching “much more pessimistic conclusions about the long-term economic prospects of the average family” than, for example, Godwin and Condorcet who had maintained that the economic position of mankind will continue to improve over time.

scholarly journals Explaining the fame of Friedman’s Presidential Address

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (6) ◽  
pp. 1683-1700 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Forder ◽  
Kardin Sømme
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Address ◽  
American Economic Association ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Economic Association ◽  
Terminological Confusion ◽  
Do So

AbstractIt is noted that although in fact it lacks the revolutionary content commonly ascribed to it, Friedman’s Presidential Address to the American Economic Association is very highly regarded as an original and formative contribution. It is argued that close attention to the literature shows that it was not initially seen as original, and only after an interval of five years did the idea of its revolutionary status retrospectively, but suddenly become widely accepted. The explanation of this change of view is considered. Four explanations are suggested: one involving terminological confusion, one involving a change in theoretical priorities, and two involving debates of the 1970s, which, although they did not in fact do so, appeared to build on Friedman’s presentation, and by this appearance gave it an undeserved stature.

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