1st Edition

Evolutionary Financial Macroeconomics

By Giorgos Argitis Copyright 2020
    150 Pages
    by Routledge

    150 Pages
    by Routledge

    Thorstein Veblen and Hyman Minsky are seminal thinkers who place great importance on the interaction between processes that link finance and financial markets with economic and social evolution. This book makes a contribution to the recontextualisation of the habitual, non-evolutionary and laissez-faire macroeconomic theory and policy, thus exposing the relevant contribution of the macro-theories of Veblen and Minsky.





    The book starts with an elucidation of Veblen’s cultural theory of insufficient private demand, waste and financial fragility and instability. It shows how speculative and parasitic leverage engenders solvency illusions and risk, pecuniary efficiency, low quality liability structures and socially destructive boom-bust cycles. Minsky’s creative destruction liquidity processes and coordination failures of cash flow escalate the aforementioned path-dependent developments and explosive dynamics of capitalist economies. The main themes of the book are the cultural, evolutionary and holistic vision of macroeconomics, the evolving habits of mind, routines and financial institutions, the speculative, manipulated and unstable financial markets, as well as the financial macroeconomic destabilizing effects of pecuniary and parasitic consumption and investment.





    This book will be of great interest to researchers, intellectuals and students pursuing economics and finance.

    Preface. Introduction 1. Veblen’s Cultural Macroeconomics 2. The pragmatic basis of Veblen’s approach to economic policy 3. Unsustainable asset and liability structures, market processes and Minsky’s macroeconomics 4. Minsky’s institutional stabilisers and endogenous capitalist instability 5. Cultural financial foundations for evolutionary macroeconomics Epilogue

    Biography

    Giorgos Argitis, Professor of Macroeconomics, Department of Economics, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.