I returned to the Levy Institute yesterday after the International Post Keynesian Conference in beautiful Kansas City. I will mention some of the news from the conference, for readers who are interested in the kinds of events that Levy Institute scholars attend.

At such conferences, ideas are taken very seriously, and many interesting debates were simmering at this one.  Theories and models abounded. Many of them went right to the heart of the causes of the financial crisis.

Speaking of interesting, students were among those attending and helped to organize the conference. Some were selling official conference t-shirts as well as used books in the vendors’ area. I haven’t had a chance to try my shirt on, having returned home only Sunday night on a delayed flight.

Many of the giants in the field were there.  A surprise event in honor of the Institute’s Jan Kregel took place last Thursday night, the first night of the conference.  Kregel recently joined Paul Davidson as an editor of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. A new Post Keynesian economic policy forum is online, and many from the Institute are editors. This new paperback from Eckhard Hein and Englebert Stockhammer, also on display at the conference, explains some of the ideas and history of this school of economists, including their conferences. Post Keynesian and Keynesian economics have of course been resurgent in recent years, and the topic of Hyman Minsky (whose archive is here) in particular frequently came up in the presentations and discussions among the economists.

An enjoyable keynote speech by noted author Robert Skidelsky came after the conference was officially adjourned. Skidelsky argued in favor of an “underconsumptionist” interpretation of the current world economic situation. In other words, a tilt in income distribution reduces spending by the masses. He noted that Keynes himself deployed such an argument in his later work, though his 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money emphasized that volatile investment, driven by changing expectations, largely accounted for fluctuations in total output and employment.  The speech also mentioned the views of Depression-era Fed Chair Marriner Eccles, which were featured in this recent post by Thorvald Grung Moe, another conference participant.  Skidelsky also discussed his new book, How Much Is Enough? (Amazon link), which is coauthored by Edward Skidelsky.

As for myself, I presented my most recent Levy Institute working paper and two example computable documents based on the model. The documents, which allow one to experiment with the model, along with links to the paper, appear in this May post.*  A somewhat skeptical Marc Lavoie, Fred Lee, and Sunanda Sen asked questions during the Q and A. After the session, Davidson was kind enough to bring up a few important issues that did not figure in my paper and presentation, including the key role of household credit, which has, however, been an important part of some previous work by me and other macroeconomists at the Institute (like this 2007 brief on the potential for a mortgage crisis, which I coauthored with Dimitri Papadimitriou and Gennaro Zezza).

*Note: The post is now slightly revised.- G.H., October 3.