Not only have I got Jim D responding in hot denial, also my other colleague and (usually) agreeable friend, Barkely R. :-) Hey, none of it was personal nor were my comments directed to anyone personally. In fact, (if I must confess) I had deleted the comments from my mail and was only responding to a kind of technical acceptance of the idea of NRU/Nairu which I find totally anathema to radical *or* post Keynesian analysis. I think we all agree (?) that there is nothing "natural" about the rate of unemployment. Does anyone disagree? What I find more insidious is the concept of Nairu -- the non- accelerating inflation rate of unemployment. What does this imply? Is it not a long-run vertical phillips curve? And what does that say? YOU CAN DO NOTHING ABOUT THE LEVEL OF EMPLOYMENT WITHOUT ACCELERATING INFLATION (presumably into hyperinflation). Put another way, it means acceptance of the monetarist line. It rejects -- not only the bastard Keynesian Phillips curve analysis of the 1950s-1970s -- but also **all** Keynesian/ postKeynesian concepts of a horizontal Phillips curve (see, for example, Wheeler in Piore, Unemployment and Inflation.) In short, before we can even talk about employment and macro policy, I think we must divest ourselves of any NRU/Nairu polutants and look again at the determinants and mechanisms of the excercize of economic power in the distribution of income and the determination of prices, at both micro and macro levels. NRU and Nairu are both related ideological constructs that, as long as we keep arguing about them, will deflect us from analyzing the real causes of exploitation and misery. In northern frozen solidarity, Paul Phillips, Economics, University of Manitoba
