Keynes’s employment function and the gratuitous Phillips curve disaster

Kakarot-Handtke, Egmont (2012): Keynes’s employment function and the gratuitous Phillips curve disaster.

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.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• 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
• Subjects: E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics > E1 - General Aggregative Models > E12 - Keynes ; Keynesian ; Post-Keynesian; E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics > E2 - Consumption, Saving, Production, Investment, Labor Markets, and Informal Economy > E24 - Employment ; Unemployment ; Wages ; Intergenerational Income Distribution ; Aggregate Human Capital ; Aggregate Labor Productivity

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