Doug, as one of the dour lefties on the list, I would mostly agree with you
but still ...
Couldn't we just as well ask how an 8 year expansion could have done so
little ....
Your note about the improbability of the expansion with the growing surplus
is worthy of note, but I think we have some idea about what replaced
government demand and why a continuation is not sustainable.
Also, the more secure job part still seems suspect. Do you have much to go
on beside the Stephanie Schmit (sp?) paper? Do you have a URL for the
paper? High tech producers in Cal. are rife with examples of workers being
fired and then rehired as temp workers, albeit with a degree of job security.
Doug Henwood wrote:
> Yes I know all this. I write about it a lot even. What stuns me,
> though, is the apparent inability of left economists to acknowledge
> that some half-decent things have happened to the U.S. working class
> over the last 5 years - higher wages, more secure jobs, fewer in
> poverty, a narrowing of the racial income gap - things we've been
> agitating for for decades. Instead of acknowledging this and asking
> why it happened and if and how it could be sustained and/or spread
> about elsewhere, we hear about tremors and vulnerabilities. And
> according to standard Keynesian doctrine, this expansion shouldn't
> have happened, but it has. Yet there's little effort to think about
> why.
>
> There's an old Christian heresy - Malebranche is it? - that holds
> that God destined Adam & Eve to fall so that He could have the
> satisfying mission of saving us. I'm tempted to think that lots of
> lefties cherish disaster so that they can be the secular saviors.
>
> But what do I know, I never get out.
>
> Doug
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901
