Table Of ContentCan Heterodox Economics Make a Difference?
For my family, Alison, Jonny and Catherine
Can Heterodox
Economics Make
a Difference?
Conversations With Key Thinkers
Phil Armstrong
University of Southampton Solent and Engineering Division,
York College, UK
Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA
© Phil Armstrong 2020
Cover art by Catherine Armstrong.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or
photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
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Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.
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A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020944721
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Contents
Interviewee biographies vii
Foreword I xx
Geoff Harcourt
Foreword II xxi
Sheila Dow
Preface xxiii
Acknowledgements xxix
Introduction 1
PART I ROUND ONE INTERVIEWS (2018)
1 Professor Victoria Chick 7
2 Professor Tim Congdon CBE 25
3 Professor Paul Davidson 46
4 Professor Kevin Dowd 60
5 Professor Roger Farmer 79
6 Professor Charles Goodhart CBE, FBA 99
7 Professor Geoff Harcourt 109
8 Dr James Juniper 118
9 Professor Andrew Kliman 129
10 Professor Marc Lavoie 140
11 Professor William (Bill) Mitchell 152
12 Warren Mosler 165
13 Dr Thomas Palley 173
14 Professor Ricardo Reis 190
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vi Can heterodox economics make a difference?
15 Professor Malcolm Sawyer 213
16 Professor Willi Semmler 233
17 Professor Anwar Shaikh 244
18 Professor Engelbert Stockhammer 260
19 Professor Martin Watts 275
20 Professor L. Randall Wray 284
PART II ROUND TWO INTERVIEWS (2019)
21 Professor David Colander 292
22 Professor Sheila Dow 302
23 Professor Scott Ferguson 316
24 Professor Geoff Hodgson 327
25 Professor Jonathan Joseph 342
26 Professor Steve Keen 353
27 Professor Tony Lawson 370
28 Professor Jamie Morgan 392
29 Dr Ioana Negru 415
30 Associate Professor Nick Potts 423
31 Professor John Smithin 440
Conclusion 452
Appendix 1: Interview questions 456
Appendix 2: White Paper: Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) 461
Bibliography 466
Index 474
Interviewee biographies
Victoria Chick is Emeritus Professor of Economics at University College
London. She has written extensively on money, macroeconomics (espe-
cially the economics of Keynes) and methodology, in many articles and
three books: The Theory of Monetary Policy (2nd edition Blackwell, 1978),
Macroeconomics after Keynes: A Reconsideration of The General Theory
(MIT Press, 1983) and On Money, Method and Keynes: Selected Essays (ed.
P. Arestis and S. C. Dow, Macmillan, 1992). She has held many visiting
posts, including the Bundesbank Visiting Professorship at the Free University,
Berlin, and has served as an economist at the Reserve Bank of Australia. She
is a member of the Skidelsky Committee on Curriculum Change in Economics
and is an adviser to Rethinking Economics, which campaigns for curriculum
change and fosters the public understanding of economics. Professor Chick is
Life President of the Association for Heterodox Economics.
David Colander received his PhD from Columbia University and was the
Christian A. Johnson Distinguished Professor of Economics at Middlebury
College, Middlebury, Vermont from 1982 to 2013 when he was appointed
Distinguished College Professor at Middlebury College. In 2001–2002 he
was the Kelly Professor of Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University.
He has authored, co-authored, or edited over 40 books and 150 articles on
a wide range of topics. His books have been translated into a number of dif-
ferent languages, including Chinese, Bulgarian, Polish, Italian, and Spanish.
He has been president of both the Eastern Economic Association and History
of Economic Thought Society and is, or has been, on the editorial boards of
numerous journals.
Tim Congdon CBE has been a long-term advocate of ‘sound money’ and
free markets in the UK’s public policy debates. He is currently chairman of
the Institute of International Monetary Research (www .mv -pt .org), which he
founded in 2014. Tim’s most influential position was a member of the Treasury
Panel of Independent Forecasters (the so-called ‘wise men’) between 1992 and
1997, which advised the Chancellor of the Exchequer on economic policy.
He founded Lombard Street Research, one of the City of London’s leading
economic research consultancies, in 1989, and was its Managing Director from
1989 to 2001 and its Chief Economist from 2001 to 2005. Tim has been a visit-
vii
viii Can heterodox economics make a difference?
ing professor at the Cardiff Business School and the City University Business
School (now the Cass Business School), and was a Visiting Research Fellow
at the London School of Economics between 2005 and 2007. He was awarded
the CBE for services to economic debate in 1997. He is often regarded as the
UK’s leading representative of ‘monetarist’ economic thinking. His books
include Monetarism: An Essay in Definition (Centre for Policy Studies, 1978),
Monetary Control in Britain (Macmillan, 1982), The Debt Threat (Blackwell,
1988), Reflections on Monetarism (Edward Elgar, 1992), Money and Asset
Prices in Boom and Bust (Institute of Economic Affairs, 2005), Keynes, the
Keynesians and Monetarism (Edward Elgar, 2007), How to Stop the Recession
(Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation, 2009) and Central Banking
in a Free Society (Institute of Economic Affairs, 2009). His book Money in
a Free Society (Encounter Books, 2011) was more specifically a response to
the Great Recession. In June 2017 a collection of papers Money in the Great
Recession, which Tim has edited, was published by Edward Elgar. Tim was
honorary secretary of the Political Economy Club from 1999 to 2010, and
chairman of the Freedom Association from 2011 to 2015. He has since 2008
been a columnist for Standpoint magazine, where he has written and com-
mented about economics, but also outside the economic field which is his main
interest. He has been a member of the UK Independence Party since 2007. He
was runner-up in the 2010 UKIP leadership election and UKIP economics
spokesman 2010–14.
Paul Davidson is one of the leading representatives of the American branch
of the Post-Keynesian school. He is a prolific writer and a renowned analyst
of the work of J. M. Keynes. He has actively intervened in important debates
on economic policy (natural resources, international monetary system, devel-
oping country debt) from a position that is very critical of mainstream eco-
nomics. Davidson is Holly Professor of Excellence, Emeritus at the University
of Tennessee in Knoxville. He is a Visiting Scholar at the Schwartz Center
for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School. Besides the University of
Pennsylvania, the University of Tennessee, and the New School, Davidson
has taught economics at Rutgers University, and the European Universities
of Cambridge, Bristol, Nice, Strasbourg and Vienna. In the early 1960s he
worked at Continental Oil Company. Davidson and Sidney Weintraub founded
the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics in 1978. Davidson continued as
editor until 2014. He is also a contributor to the Center for Full Employment
and Stability.
Sheila Dow is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Stirling,
Scotland, and Adjunct Professor of Economics at the University of Victoria,
Canada. Her main academic focus is on raising methodological awareness in
the fields of macroeconomics, money and banking, and the history of economic
Interviewee biographies ix
thought (especially Hume, Smith and Keynes). While her career has primarily
been in academia, she has held positions with the Bank of England and the
Government of Manitoba, and as special adviser on monetary policy to the UK
Treasury Select Committee. She has held positions such as Chair of INEM and
is currently a member of the Academic Council of INET and of the Academic
Advisory Board of the ISRF. Recent books include Economic Methodology:
An Inquiry (Oxford University Press, 2002), A History of Scottish Economic
Thought (Routledge, 2006, co-edited with Alexander Dow) and Foundations
for New Economic Thinking (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Kevin Dowd is Professor of Finance and Economics at Durham University
Business School. He has written extensively on a number of subjects, includ-
ing monetary economics, macroeconomics, banking/central banking/financial
regulation, pensions, political economy and the current financial crisis, but
his main interest is on the impact of the state on the financial system. He has
affiliations with the Cato Institute (Washington DC), the Cobden Centre,
the Independent Institute (Oakland, CA), the Institute of Economic Affairs
(London), the Istituto Bruno Leoni (Milan), and the Pensions Institute
(London). His most recent book, co-authored with Martin Hutchinson, is
Alchemists of Loss: How Modern Finance and Government Intervention
Crashed the Financial System (Wiley, 2010) which explains how bad ideas
and vested interests caused the financial crisis. Professor Dowd is a leading
advocate of the Austrian school.
Roger Farmer is Research Director at NIESR, London, and Professor of
Economics at the University of Warwick in the UK. He is also Distinguished
Professor of Economics at UCLA. He is a world leading economist and former
Senior Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England. He has published
numerous scholarly articles in leading academic journals, as well as books
that have been translated into Chinese, Italian, Vietnamese and Hungarian.
He has previously held positions at the University of Pennsylvania, the
European University Institute and the University of Toronto. He is a Fellow
of the Econometric Society, Research Associate of the National Bureau of
Economic Research, Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy
Research, Fellow Commoner of Cambridge University, and Co-Editor of the
International Journal of Economic Theory. His most recent book is Prosperity
for All: How to Prevent Financial Crises (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Scott Ferguson is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the
Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at the University of South
Florida. He also co-directs the Modern Money Network Humanities Division
and serves as a research scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainability
Prosperity. His writings have appeared in Screen, Boundary 2 Online, Arcade,
