Notes from the Editors, October 2014

Abstract

buy this issueSecular stagnation (or the trend towards long-term slow growth and continuing high unemployment/underemployment) has become a big issue in the mature economies since 2013, when former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers raised the question at an IMF economic forum. Compilations of work on the subject can now be found on the Internet, such as the one by economists Coen Teulings and Richard Baldwin; which however leaves out all contributions by heterodox economists ("Secular Stagnation: Facts, Causes and Cures," August 15, 2014, http://voxeu.org). Teulings and Baldwin credit Summers with having "resurrected" the secular stagnation issue. But is this true? Only in the sense that he reintroduced it to mainstream neoclassical economics. It has long been a topic on the left, and particularly in Monthly Review, where editor Paul Sweezy explicitly drew attention to the "secular stagnation" question more than forty years ago ("Notes on the U.S. Situation at the End of 1972," MR, January 1973)—with MR tracking the stagnation trend month by month in the four decades that followed.… Isn't it about time…that orthodox economists, Summers included, began to acknowledge the enormous work done on this topic on the left over decades, and indeed the greater complexity and historicity of the analysis to be found there—not only in MR but within heterodox economics more generally? Such an admission might even do orthodox economists some good.

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