Notes from the Editors, July-August 2016

Abstract

buy this issueCommenting in the January 1973 issue of Monthly Review on the declining condition of the U.S. economy, Paul Sweezy brought back the question of "secular stagnation," first advanced by Keynes's leading follower Alvin Hansen in the late 1930s. "The U.S. economy," Sweezy wrote, in an article entitled "Notes on the U.S. Situation at the End of 1972," "is experiencing at one and the same time a cyclical boom and secular stagnation." The resurfacing of stagnation, he suggested, was the product in part of the U.S. attempt to unwind from the Vietnam War, which had previously been lifting the economy.… A couple of months after the publication of Sweezy's article, in March 1973, the New York Times, seeking to quiet the widening anti-capitalist protests, ran a series of articles on its op-ed page under the general heading of "Capitalism, for Better or Worse." The series concentrated on the two phenomena of the weakening of economic prosperity and the decline of military spending resulting from the drawing down of the Vietnam War. One of these articles, misleadingly entitled "Taking Stock of War," appearing on March 14, was written by Paul Samuelson, then considered to be the leading neoclassical economist in the United States.

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