IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/43111.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Keynes’s employment function and the gratuitous Phillips curve disaster

Author

Listed:
  • Kakarot-Handtke, Egmont

Abstract

Keynes had a lot of plausible things to say about unemployment and its causes. His ‘mercurial mind’, though, relied on intuition which means that he could not prove his diverse opinions convincingly. This explains why Keynes’s ideas immediately invited bastardizations. One of them, the Phillips curve synthesis, proved to be fatal. This paper identifies Keynes’s undifferentiated employment function as weak spot. The structural employment function, on the other hand, works in inflationary and deflationary environments and supersedes the bastard Phillips curve. It will be rigorously demonstrated why there is no trade-off between price inflation and unemployment.

Suggested Citation

  • Kakarot-Handtke, Egmont, 2012. "Keynes’s employment function and the gratuitous Phillips curve disaster," MPRA Paper 43111, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:43111
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/43111/1/MPRA_paper_43111.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gordon, Robert J, 1990. "What Is New-Keynesian Economics?," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 28(3), pages 1115-1171, September.
    2. Frank Ackerman, 2001. "Still dead after all these years: interpreting the failure of general equilibrium theory," Journal of Economic Methodology, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 9(2), pages 119-139.
    3. Johannes J. Klant, 1994. "The Nature Of Economic Thought," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 262.
    4. Forder, James, 2010. "Friedman’S Nobel Lecture And The Phillips Curve Myth," Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Cambridge University Press, vol. 32(3), pages 329-348, September.
    5. Robert E. Hall, 2011. "The Long Slump," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(2), pages 431-469, April.
    6. Olivier Blanchard & Lawrence F. Katz, 1997. "What We Know and Do Not Know about the Natural Rate of Unemployment," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 11(1), pages 51-72, Winter.
    7. Kakarot-Handtke, Egmont, 2012. "The rhetoric of failure: a hyper-dialog about method in economics and how to get things going," MPRA Paper 43276, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    8. Marek Hudik, 2011. "Why economics is not a science of behaviour," Journal of Economic Methodology, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(2), pages 147-162.
    9. Kakarot-Handtke, Egmont, 2011. "Keynes’s missing axioms," MPRA Paper 32742, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 11 Aug 2011.
    10. A. W. Phillips, 1958. "The Relation Between Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861–1957," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 25(100), pages 283-299, November.
    11. Frank Hahn & Robert Solow, 1997. "A Critical Essay on Modern Macroeconomic Theory," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 026258154x, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kakarot-Handtke, Egmont, 2013. "Toolism! A Critique of Econophysics," MPRA Paper 46630, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Kakarot-Handtke, Egmont, 2013. "Settling the theory of saving," MPRA Paper 44479, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Kakarot-Handtke, Egmont, 2013. "Understanding Profit and the Markets: The Canonical Model," MPRA Paper 48691, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Kakarot-Handtke, Egmont, 2012. "Taxes, profits, and employment: a structural axiomatic analysis," MPRA Paper 43581, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Ying Liang & Runxia Cao, 2015. "Employment assistance policies of Chinese government play positive roles! The impact of post-earthquake employment assistance policies on the health-related quality of life of Chinese earthquake popul," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 120(3), pages 835-857, February.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kakarot-Handtke, Egmont, 2010. "Axiomatic Basics of e-Economics," MPRA Paper 24331, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Kakarot-Handtke, Egmont, 2011. "Increasing returns and stability," MPRA Paper 33133, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Egmont Kakarot-Handtke, 2013. "The Emergence of Profit and Interest in the Monetary Circuit," World Economic Review, World Economics Association, vol. 2013(2), pages 106-106, February.
    4. Kakarot-Handtke, Egmont, 2012. "General formal foundations of the virtuous deficit–profit symmetry and the vicious debt deflation," MPRA Paper 42912, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Vincent Dadam & Nicola Viegi, 2021. "Estimating a New Keynesian Wage Phillips Curve," Working Papers 202107, University of Pretoria, Department of Economics.
    6. Aurélien Goutsmedt & Goulven Rubin, 2018. "Robert J. Gordon and the introduction of the natural rate hypothesis in the Keynesian framework," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) halshs-01821825, HAL.
    7. Bozani, Vasiliki & Drydakis, Nick, 2011. "Studying the NAIRU and its Implications," IZA Discussion Papers 6079, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    8. Robert G. King & Mark W. Watson, 1994. "The Post-War U.S. Phillips Curve: A Revisionist Econometric History," Working Papers 1994-2, Princeton University. Economics Department..
    9. Gebhard Kirchgässner, 2015. "Wissenschaftlicher Fortschritt in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften: Einige Bemerkungen," Schmollers Jahrbuch : Journal of Applied Social Science Studies / Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, vol. 135(2), pages 209-248.
    10. Hjelm, Göran & Jönsson, Kristian, 2010. "In Search of a Method for Measuring the Output Gap of the Swedish Economy," Working Papers 115, National Institute of Economic Research.
    11. Homburg, Stefan, 2017. "A Study in Monetary Macroeconomics," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780198807537.
    12. Pant, Hom & Warr, Peter, 2016. "Modelling Involuntary Unemployment in Applied GE Models," Conference papers 332799, Purdue University, Center for Global Trade Analysis, Global Trade Analysis Project.
    13. Simone Auer, 2018. "Labour market conditions and wage inflation in CEE economies," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 460, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    14. Renato Faccini & Leonardo Melosi, 2019. "Bad Jobs and Low Inflation," 2019 Meeting Papers 970, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    15. Vasiliki Bozani, 2011. "NAIRU, Unemployment and Post Keynesian Economics," Working Papers 1105, University of Crete, Department of Economics.
    16. Harding, Martín & Lindé, Jesper & Trabandt, Mathias, 2022. "Resolving the missing deflation puzzle," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 126(C), pages 15-34.
    17. Faryna, Oleksandr & Pham, Tho & Talavera, Oleksandr & Tsapin, Andriy, 2020. "Wage Setting and Unemployment: Evidence from Online Job Vacancy Data," GLO Discussion Paper Series 503, Global Labor Organization (GLO).
    18. Dale T. Mortensen, 2011. "Markets with Search Friction and the DMP Model," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(4), pages 1073-1091, June.
    19. Afful, Efua Amoonua, 2014. "Does Employment Protection Legislation Induce Structural Unemployment? Evidence from 15 OECD Countries," MPRA Paper 56875, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    new framework of concepts; structure-centric; axiom set; Say’s regime; Keynes’s regime; market clearing; full employment; product price flexibility; intertemporal budget balancing; multiplier; trade-off; price inflation; wage inflation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E12 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General Aggregative Models - - - Keynes; Keynesian; Post-Keynesian; Modern Monetary Theory
    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:43111. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.