Laughter is the best medicine

Click here to access article by David Ruccio from Real-World Economics Review Blog.

The basic question of the conference was: does contemporary macroeconomics, in the wake of the Second Great Depression, require a few reforms or does it need a wholesale revolution? Blanchard lined up in the reform camp, with Summers calling for a revolution—with the added spice of Adam Posen referring to himself as Trotsky to Summers’s Lenin.

Although from the description it would suggest that the economics conference would have take a debating form. But such was not the case. The headline for this piece is economist Ruccio's way of reacting to a conference which ended up avoiding the serious issues of growing inequality in current capitalism. As such I think the conference is another illustration of upper-middle class academics who are much more concerned about following the capitalist party line and securing their careers than in solving serious issues with contemporary capitalism. I also suspect this is partly because the problems are insolvable within capitalism.