This timely biography of the economist Wynne Godley (1926-2010) charts his long and often crisis-blown route to a new way of understanding whole economies. It shows how early frustrations as a policy-maker enabled him to glimpse the cliff-edges other macro-modellers missed, and re-arm ‘Keynesian’ theory against the orthodoxy that had tried to absorb it. Godley gained notoriety for his economic commentaries - foreseeing the malaise of the 1970s, the Reagan-Thatcher slump, the unsustainable 1980s and 1990s booms, and the crises in the Eurozone and world economies after 2008. This foresight arose from a series of advances in his understanding of national accounting, price-setting, the role of modern finance, and the use of economic data, especially to grasp the interlinkage of stocks and flows. This biography also gives due attention to Godley's life outside academic economics – including his chaotic childhood, truncated career as a professional oboist, equally brief stints as a sculptor’s model and economist in industry, and a longer spell as as a Treasury adviser with a mystery gift for forecasting. This first full-length biography traces Wynne Godley’s long career from professional musician to public servant, policymaker, tormentor of conventional macroeconomics and creator of a workable alternative – all after escaping a childhood of decaying mansions and draconian schools, and rescuing his private world from the legacy of two Freuds. Drawing on Godley’s published and unpublished work and extensive interviews with those who knew him, the author explores Godley's improbable life and explains the lasting significance of his work.

This book challenges the mainstream paradigm, based on the inter-temporal optimisation of welfare by individual agents. It introduces a methodology for studying how institutions create flows of income, expenditure and production together with stocks of assets and liabilities, thereby determining how whole economies evolve through time.

This book challenges the mainstream paradigm, based on the inter-temporal optimisation of welfare by individual agents. It introduces a methodology for studying how it is institutions which create flows of income, expenditure and production together with stocks of assets and liabilities, thereby determining how whole economies evolve through time.

Selected essays from the eminent economist, Wynne Godley, tracing the development of his work and illuminating the key theories and models that made his name. Essays focus not only on the stock-flow coherent approach, but also lay out Godley's views about the European Union and the stability of its monetary policy.

Cambridge University has and continues to be one of the most important centres for economics. With nine chapters on themes in Cambridge economics and over 40 chapters on the lives and work of Cambridge economists, this volume shows how economics became established at the university, how it produced some of the world's best-known economists, including John Maynard Keynes and Alfred Marshall, plus Nobel Prize winners, such as Richard Stone and James Mirrlees, and how it remains a global force for the very best in teaching and research in economics. With original contributions from a stellar cast, this volume provides economists – especially those interested in macroeconomics and the history of economic thought – with the first in-depth analysis of Cambridge economics.

Offers two theses - first, on why the rise of a monetarist approach to economic policy in Britain in the 1970s enabled the Thatcher government's success in reducing inflation in the 1980s and the second, on how the abandonment of them in the mid-1980s led to inflation in the late 1980s.

Orthodox macroeconomics is founded on microeconomics. Heterodox economists either reject micro foundations or experiment with behavioural relationships without paying attention to the principles that generate them. The book takes off from Michal Kalecki’s aphorism about economics being a science that confused stocks and flows. Kalecki was famous for presiding over a marriage between Marx and Keynes and all three figure prominently in the volume. However, the first part of the title is a homage to Wynne Godley who pioneered stock-flow-consistent modeling in our times. The authors exploit lagged values of variables emerging from the definitions. Lags also emerge in so-called stock-flow norms connecting the aggregates. Some moving and shaking of identities and a difference or differential equation emerges. The requirements for stability of the dynamic systems are illuminating and the reader can stop at structure and history with the first half of the book. The conversation with orthodoxy begins with the second part. The equivalent equation systems of the first part throw up different pairs of characters whose happiness must be maximised over time. The price to pay through the solution process is the confrontation with many ugly expressions but the explicit calculations are undertaken repeatedly only to reassure students through drillwork that tedium is not the same as difficulty. The payoffs are that variable transitions in capitalism (the second part of the title) are captured from a small clutch of identities. The movements from backward agriculture to capitalism, from ‘golden age’ capitalism to ‘financialization’, are modeled. A separate chapter is devoted to Europe. The policy prescriptions of heterodox economics do not compare with the richness of critique and positive analysis. ‘Positive’ and ‘normative’ are one in this work, the combination of stock-flow norms along with ‘forgotten’ policy variables like the tax rate promising order and stability to economies.

"This is a very important book."--Martin Wolf, Financial TimesA provocative look at how today's trade conflicts are caused by governments promoting the interests of elites at the expense of workers Longlisted for the 2020 Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award "Worth reading for [the authors'] insights into the history of trade and finance."--George Melloan, Wall Street Journal Trade disputes are usually understood as conflicts between countries with competing national interests, but as Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis show, they are often the unexpected result of domestic political choices to serve the interests of the rich at the expense of workers and ordinary retirees. Klein and Pettis trace the origins of today's trade wars to decisions made by politicians and business leaders in China, Europe, and the United States over the past thirty years. Across the world, the rich have prospered while workers can no longer afford to buy what they produce, have lost their jobs, or have been forced into higher levels of debt. In this thought-provoking challenge to mainstream views, the authors provide a cohesive narrative that shows how the class wars of rising inequality are a threat to the global economy and international peace--and what we can do about it.

The past few decades have witnessed the emergence of economic imbalances at the world level and within the euro zone. The failure of mainstream economics to accurately predict financial crises, or model the effects of finance-led growth, highlights the need for alternative frameworks. A key text, Global Imbalances and Financial Capitalism: Stock-Flow-Consistent Modelling demonstrates that Stock-Flow-Consistent models are well adapted to study this growth regime due to their ability to analyse the real and financial sides of the economy in an integrated way. This approach is combined with an analysis of exchange rate misalignments using the Fundamental Equilibrium Exchange Rate (FEER) methodology, which serves to give a synthetic view of international imbalances. Together, these models describe how global and regional imbalances are created, as well as suggest appropriate tools through which they may be reduced. The book also considers alternative economic policies in the euro zone (international risk sharing, fiscal federalism, eurobonds, European investments, a multispeed euro zone) alongside alternative monetary policies. In particular, it examines the possibilities of using SDR (Special Drawing Rights) as a reserve asset to be issued to fight a global recession, to support the development of low-income countries, or as an anchor to improve global monetary stability. This text will be of interest to students, scholars, and researchers of economic theory and international monetary economics. It will also appeal to professional organisations who supervise international relations.