The Soviet Union, Britain, France, and South America (with the aid of the Catholic Church and Western power) harbored Nazi scientists, etc. I forgot to mention this. Now let me add this:
1) For those inter ... read full comment
Dear Readers,
The Soviet Union, Britain, France, and South America (with the aid of the Catholic Church and Western power) harbored Nazi scientists, etc. I forgot to mention this. Now let me add this:
1) For those interested in the discussion of Jews in the Nazi Army in Ryan Rigg's book "Hitler's Jewish Soldiers," should please also read Shlomo Sand's "The Invention of Jewish People" for a related discussion of who is a "Jew."
2) I have providedreferences for some of the capitalists/corprations that built and ran some of Hitler's gas chambers and extermination camps.
3) There is a need to reconcile Hitler's adoption of socialism concepts and Karl Marx as a foremost theoretician of socialism? Did the anti-Semitic Hitler know Marx was a Jew?
Read on:
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Re: Nkrumahism, The Can of Worms I Opened–Hitler's Mein Kampf 1
PHILIP KOBINA BAIDOO, JR. AND HIS AGITPROP REVISIONIST HISTORY
Mr. Baidoo, the half-story teller is at it again!
First off, we should want to bring to Mr. Baidoo’s attention little-known facts about Jewish contribution to the European Holocaust, just as some African chiefs and kings did both in the European Slave Trade (the so-called Transatlantic Slave Trade) and the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade. We are here referring to the Judenrats (Jewish Council of Elders) in the case of the Holocaust. Even more conspicuously, Mr. Baidoo's articles did not mention what historian Bryan Mark Rigg calls "Hitler's Jewish Soldiers" (see his book "Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military"). This is to be expected because Mr. Baidoo is not a well-rounded writer. We have more than sufficiently overstated this observation in our previous rejoinder articles exposing the weaknesses of his arguments.
That said, the implications of Rigg’s profound historical work is mind-boggling in terms of the fact that not many people are aware Jews formed part of the Nazi Army, some holding senior positions in it. The other point is that some Jewish organizations, scholars, and leaders did not particularly like the book's revelations, fearing that, among other reasons, others might use them to justify the actions of Hitler and the Nazis (Dr. Rigg is a Cambridge-trained historian and Jewish himself; see his other book "Lives of Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: Untold Tales of Men of Jewish Descent Who Fought for the Third Reich").
More important, though, Mr. Baidoo failed to show the links among the Holocaust, colonialism, Nazism (“Mein Kampf”), and the Herero and Namaqua Genocide (the first of such in modern history; the German Holocaust and its associated diabolical acts had its colonial roots in the German extermination of the Herero and Namaqua of South-West Africa, present-day Namibia, and American racist laws and her development of eugenics). Again Mr. Baidoo may not have known these facts. Here are some important texts (all written by leading Jewish scholars, authors, historians, and political scientists) demonstrating Jewish supposed collaborations with the Nazis leading up to, during, and after the Holocaust (the Final Solution) for Mr. Baidoo:
1) "The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine" (Edwin Black)
2) "51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis" (Lenni Brenner)
3) "Zionism in the Age of Dictators" (Lenni Brenner)
4) "Perfidy" (Ben Hecht)
5) "Jews for Sale?: Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933-1945" (Yehuda Bauer)
6) "The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering" (Norman Finkelstein)
7) "The Unheeded Cry" (Abraham Fuchs)
8) "The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust" (Tom Segev)
9) "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" (Hannah Arendt)
So much for Jewish involvement in the Holocaust. We mentioned earlier that the German Holocaust had its colonial roots in South West Africa (Namibia) and American racist laws and her development of eugenics. These statements are well-documented facts (Edwin Black). The latter writes: “In ‘Mein Kampf,’ published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. ‘There is today one state,’ wrote Hitler, ‘in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.’” Mr. Baidoo glossed this fact in discussing “Mein Kampf.”
AMERICAN EUGENICS, ADOLPH HITLER AND NAZISM
The story of eugenics is deeper and captivating. It is generally believed among historians that its modern formulation originated with Sir Francis Gaston, Charles Darwin’s cousin, in the Victorian Age. It then traveled from the United Kingdom (Britain), where Mr. Baidoo presently lives, to America where it was perfected. From America eugenics landed in Germany. American scientists and research institutions, for instance the Carnegie Institution, began sharing their expertise and findings with German scientists. Also an American foundation such as the Rockefeller Foundation “helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz,” writes Black. “The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in America was a ‘lethal chamber’ or public locally operated gas chambers.”
Gas chambers became one of the potent weapons the Nazis used to annihilate their victims. We should also stress that Eugen Fischer, Chancellor of the University of Berlin and one of the important German scientists involved in eugenic experiments on ethnic Namibians in the beginning of the 20th century, taught medicine to Nazi doctors including Otmar von Verschuer, who in turn had Josef Mengele as one of his research assistants. Both Fischer and another German Frantz von Epp, who also played a leading role in the Herero Genocide, would later lend their expertise to Hitler and the Nazis. We should bear in mind that the Herero and Namaqua Genocide and eugenic experiments in South West Africa predated the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. Black recalls the relationship between Verschuer and Mengele:
“Verschuer had a long-time assistant. His name was Josef Mengele. On May 30, 1943, Mengele arrived at Auschwitz. Verschuer notified the German Research Society, ‘My assistant, Dr. Josef Mengele (M.D., Ph.D.) joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed Hauptsturmfuhrer [captain] and camp physician in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Anthropological testing of the most diverse racial groups in this concentration camp is being carried out with permission of the SS Reichsfuhrer [Himmler].’”
The Germans had used concentration camps and slave labor in connection with the Herero and Namaqua of South West Africa (Namibia) long before their appearance in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, just as the British had used concentration camps in the connection with the Boers during the Anglo-Boer Wars in South Africa (Finkelstein). These are just by the way. Black continues:
“Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German Officials and scientists. Hitler studied American eugenics laws…Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. I have studied with great interest,’ he told a fellow Nazi, ‘the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.’ Hitler wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant calling his race-based eugenics book, ‘The Passing of the Great Race’ his Bible.”
The successes of Nazi eugenics caught the attention of eugenicists across America, with California eugenicists republishing “Nazi propaganda for American consumption” (Black). California eugenicists also organized scientific exhibits for Nazi scientists (1934). Black further notes: “More than just providing the scientific roadmap, America funded Germany’s eugenic institutions. By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410, 000…to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 to the German Psychiatric Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute…Among the leading psychiatrists at the German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rudin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler’s systematic medical repression.”
“Another in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s eugenic complex of institutions was the institute for Brain Research,” Black continues. “Since 1915, it had operated out of a single room. Everything changed when Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the Institute to construct a major building and take center stage in German race biology. The Institute received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years. Leading the Institute, once again, was Hitler’s medical henchman Ernst Rudin. Rudin’s organization became a prime director and recipient of the murderous experimentation and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and others."
Black concludes: “A special recipient of Rockefeller funding was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. For decades, American eugenicists had craved twins to advance their research into heredity. The Institute was now prepared to undertake such research on an unprecedented level… At the time of Rockefeller's endowment, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a hero in American eugenics circles, functioned as a head of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Rockefeller funding of that Institute continued both directly and through other research conduits during Verschuer's early tenure.
“In 1935, Verschuer left the Institute to form a rival eugenics facility in Frankfurt that was much heralded in the American eugenic press. Research on twins in the Third Reich exploded, backed up by government decrees. Verschuer wrote in ‘Der Erbarzt,’ a eugenic doctor's journal he edited, that Germany's war would yield a ‘total solution to the Jewish problem’…
“Mengele began searching the boxcar arrivals for twins. When he found them, he performed beastly experiments, scrupulously wrote up the reports and sent the paperwork back to Verschuer's institute for evaluation. Often, cadavers, eyes and other body parts were also dispatched to Berlin's eugenic institutes.
“Rockefeller executives never knew of Mengele. With few exceptions, the foundation had ceased all eugenic studies in Nazi-occupied Europe before the war erupted in 1939. But by that time the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and Carnegie financed, the institutions they helped found, and the science it helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.
“After the war, eugenics was declared a crime against humanity–an act of genocide. Germans were tried and they cited the California statutes in their defense. To no avail. They were found guilty…
“Human genetics' genocidal roots in eugenics were ignored by a victorious generation that refused to link itself to the crimes of Nazism and by succeeding generations that never knew the truth of the years leading up to war. Now governors of five states, including California have issued public apologies to their citizens, past and present, for sterilization and other abuses spawned by the eugenics movement…”
Black’s account is merely one of many well-documented scholarly works on the subject. Fortunately or unfortunately, such accounts expose America’s indirect complicity in fostering the German racist national character and how that racist national character came to define German eugenics and the Holocaust itself. Mr. Baidoo did not find it necessary to bring these facts to the attention of his readership. Alas, many questions about the Second World War and the Holocaust remain unresolved or shrouded in history. Even the actual number of Jews who supposedly died in the Holocaust remains an unresolved conundrum, a heated question being debated in the international community today!
And finally, Mr. Baidoo may not have been aware that a significant percentage of the wealth Hitler and the Nazis stole from Jews in Germany and across Europe, part of which they hid in Switzerland, were hidden in America and are still here (Finkelstein). In a related context the capitalist Swiss, their banks, and their links to Nazi stolen treasure and the Vatican, Western investments in Nazi Germany, propaganda campaigns staged by the governments of Canada, Britain and Australia aimed at concealing Nazi war criminals living among their citizens, knowledge that the British and Americans had known about the Holocaust as far back as 1941, and successful attempts by American and British code-breakers of Swiss banks to conceal Nazi gold transfers as a protective cover for America’s intelligence boss Allen Dulles, etc., completely left out of Mr. Baidoo’s naïve account (Aarons & Loftus).
On the other hand other scholars argue that the British intelligence/government had known about the Holocaust as early as September 1939 but chose to do nothing about it. The British sent a cache of comprehensive intelligence information to their American counterparts in 1942, the same year President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly pleaded for solid information on what the Nazis were doing to Jews. The Americans, like the British before them, did not act on the intelligence reports and suppressed it (Grose). Yet Eleanor Roosevelt, President Roosevelt’s wife, and some prominent American politicians did not take it at all lightly when W.E.B. Du Bois took the American government to the United Nations (UN) and petitioned it to look into the manner African Americans were being unfairly treated and terrorized across America. Eleanor was the first chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights. The Commission supervised the draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She was also a national board member of the NAACP.
And in spite of the fact she supported some African American causes, her husband President Roosevelt, on the other hand, refused to support a bill meant to criminalize lynching. His primary objection to the bill was antagonizing Southerners if he had supported the bill and losing the Southern vote at the polls on that account. This was in 1935, about seven years prior to British intelligence officials handing over Nazi secrets on the Holocaust to his administration, which he failed to act on anyway.
Could it be that President Roosevelt viewed Jews and Africans the way Hitler did? This is a controversial question because by not defending a bill that would have criminalized lynching and possibly saved some African-American lives, President Roosevelt indirectly lent his support to the act, though he did not literally send African Americans to gas chambers and extermination camps as in the case of Hitler. But lynching sent some African Americans to the gas chambers and extermination camps in the American South: Their painful and horrendous deaths in the pits of American racism!
Unfortunately Jewish organizations and leaders have not mustered moral and political courage to go after the American government as they did with European government and corporations (Finkelstein). Evidently, it appears Jewish leaders do not want to lose America's support for the State of Israel and to betray the bond America has always shared with World Jewry, given what the former [America] did for the latter [World Jewry] during and after the Second World War. The other important questions are: Who financed Hitler and the Nazis? Which countries re-armed Nazi Germany and which countries helped build and expand Hitler’s technological base? Which American, British, and French corporations supported and benefited from the Nazis? How were Nazi profits repatriated back to their American owners? What role did Wall Street play in the rise of Hitler and the Nazis? How did the capitalists of the West finance and benefit from Hitler’s National Socialism? How many of the people killed during the Second World War were actually killed by the US, USSR, Japan, France, Britain, and others besides Nazi Germany?
These are important simple questions Mr. Baidoo’s articles did not delve into, though the answers are already in the public domain in the form of archival and declassified records from Russia, America, Britain, Germany, Japan, and France, as well as in scholarly publications. Mr. Baidoo may have been unaware that governments and multinational corporations from the capitalist West, including Britain where he lives, traded with socialist Nazi Germany during the war (WW2), what one writer aptly refers to as “the Nazi-American plot 1933-1949” (Higham). Perhaps more suspiciously, we were not educated on the specifics of the capitalist connection to the Holocaust and the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. For instance, “The Dearborn Independent” or “The Ford International Weekly,” a paper Henry Ford, the famous American industrialist and automotive manufacturer, owned published the anti-Semitic “The Intentional Jew” series that was later compiled into a book.
The book and its newspaper series influenced an entire generation of German youths would become part of the Nazi machinery. Hitler read them also and “The International Jew” influenced and informed his authorship of “Mein Kampf” as well as of Nazi politics (Of course Nazism had been around before Hitler’s birth as well as in a number of nations. Namely, he did not invent Nazism. Nazism had existed under various guises in places such as the United States (slavery and Jim Crowism), post-Columbian America (extermination of Native Americans), Australia (extermination of Australian Aborigines), Africa (extermination of the Herero and Namaqua; Apartheid), and Western Europe prior to Hitler’s birth). Regarding the parenthetic statement however, one author notes: “The anti-Semitism obsession of the Nazis, if not necessarily the German populace, is demonstrable even before Hitler. As Breitman puts it: ‘Even Hitler and Himmler could not know then how far or how soon they would be able to pursue their emotional impulses and ideological goals. But they knew that they needed manpower…for what they considered a political-racial war’” (Grose).
This fact and others like it invalidate the misguided notion that Hitler invented Nazism. In fact, Ford is the only American mentioned in “Mein Kampf.” Hitler kept a copy of the book in his private library, having been cited as one among a collection of books to shape his life (Ryback). Hitler also kept “a life-size portrait of Ford next to his desk” (Dobbs). Finally, he [Hitler] awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle (July 1938), Germany’s national highest decoration for non-Germans (Dobbs). Beyond these basic facts, the Ford Motor Company established joint ventures with the company I.G. Farben, a German concern. I.G. Farben produced and marketed a poison gas Zyklon B, an invention by Fritz Haber, a Jew, and his team of scientists/researchers, (see also the “I.G. Farben Trial”) used in extermination camps and gas chambers (Borkin; Jeffreys), leading to the deaths of millions.
Also John D. Rockefeller, another famous American capitalist, was reportedly involved with I.G. Farben through his companies Standard Oil Co. Inc. (and Esso Corp). I.G. Farben was one of the largest and most influential companies in the world and therefore its tentacles spread out into every corner of the world, whose directorship, scientists, and researchers teamed up with other capitalist industrialists from Western Europe in several ventures. Perhaps the surprising aspect of this shameful legacy beyond the deep ties American (and Western European) capitalist industrialists and corporations had with Hitler’s war machine and the general leadership of Nazi Germany (Riemann) is a little-known fact involving a capitalist- or privately-owned company’s contractual engagement with the Nazis that culminated in the company constructing and running some of Hitler’s concentration camps (Borkin). Again capitalism, profit motivation, human medical experimentation (eugenics), the Holocaust, slave labor, and Nazi politics (Lindner) are totally ignored in Mr. Baidoo’s articles.
Neither did Mr. Baidoo address the frustration and opposition, one American lawyer sent by the American government to Germany to decartelize Germany, had to endure at the hands of men with ties to Wall Street’s and German corporations (Martin). These “hidden” facts are gradually coming out as research into factors leading to the Holocaust and the Second World War intensifies. The facts are actually there in the public domain but academic or establishment historians, particularly in America, are trained to look elsewhere rather than directly into the face of Holocaust and Second World War historiographies, archival and declassified records. This is fast changing as some of these academic and establishment historians are turning away from the methodological parochialism of their academic professions towards a more inclusive methodology of historicism and comparative valuation of nonconventional historical material.
We can therefore understand why some lay writers and readership miss out on such important facts of history. Yet capitalism was right there in the midst of carnage, human suffering and mass murder, misery, wars, slave labor, exterminations, and so on, reaping untold profits. Even so, we still may want to ask: Why then did Mr. Baidoo delink the capitalists from the National Socialists of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, exterminations camps, and concentration camps?
We should not overlook the essential fact that the National Socialists of Nazi Germany endorsed some of the core features of capitalism such as private ownership, while dismissing German communists. It has been suggested in some of the academic literature on the subject that capitalist America preferentially financed the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in order to prevent German communists from taking over the country. We clearly see a confirmation of this suggestion with the advent and subsequent unraveling of the so-called “Operation Paperclip” at the onset of the Cold War (Jacobsen; Lichtblau; Loftus).
Then also it has been suggested through another alternative theory that the Soviet strategically played German communists against their social democrat colleagues in the hope the strategy would give a competitive advantage to the former in electoral outcomes, although, eventually, that strategy worked in Hitler’s favor by turning it into a numerical edge, bringing him and the Nazis to power. It therefore goes without saying that the factors that projected Hitler and the Nazis are many and varied, though not as naïve and simplistic as some writers would want to claim. Soviet and American politics of manipulation (this will intensify during the Cold War), dire economic conditions following the Treaty of Versailles, anti-Semitism and Henry Ford’s propaganda machine (“The International Jew”), intra-continental mutual jealousies, struggles for continental dominance, ideological clashes among Marxism and capitalism and fascism, and other historical reasons.
Above all, what is also certain as argued by some historians is that President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order requiring the federal government to do everything within its power to rescue European Jews, but the pressure mounted by big American corporations in the aftermath of the signing of the executive decree rendered the executive order inactive. In other words capitalism triumphed over human suffering. Another theory goes that the Nazi propaganda machine and other media organs made it known to the world that the Allies were fighting on behalf of Jews. And since the British and the Americans did not want to be identified with that charge, strategically refrained from acting on intelligence pointing to what the Nazis were doing to the Jews (Grose). This well-documented fact is hardly mentioned in mainstream coverage of the Holocaust as well as of the links shared amongst capitalism, the Holocaust, the rise of Hitler and Nazism, and the advent of the Second World War.
The foregoing shows how much Mr. Baidoo left out of the background history of "Mein Kampf, namely the historical connections among the African Holocaust (German extermination of the Herero and the Namaqua. This took place before the Jewish Holocaust took off). We should be equally mindful of the colonial roots of Nazism and eugenic experiments in Africa, Namibia), Nazi mistreatment of Jews (we should not exclude the Roma/Gypsies, the handicapped, homosexuals, capitalists, and “communists” in the Holocaust), Jewish complicity in the Holocaust, America's corporate links to the Holocaust and Hitler and Nazi Germany, “Mein Kampf,” and black/African suffering under Nazi Germany (Lusane), and so on.
The story and the historical record are not all that rosy, however. Thousands of Nazis came to America after the Second World War as “refugees” though many were war criminals having been involved in the Final Solution, but American officials protected some of them and then deploying them in various capacities as scientists, intelligence assets, engineers, spies, doctors, and so on. The American military, the Central Investigation Agency (CIA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) benefited from their services (Lichtblau). Readers interested in this question can read more about “Operation Paperclip," a program under which the American government headed by Harry S. Truman brought in nearly 1,600 German technicians, scientists, engineers, doctors, etc., to live and work in America, after the (American government) had given them new identities, granted them securities clearances (their criminal pasts erased), and their membership in the Nazi Party been expunged immigration documents (Lasby; Jacobson).
There also exists a detailed discussion of America’s recruitment of Nazis and fascists and collaborators of Nazis and fascists to work for America in various capacities in post-Second World War (Simpson). The Australian government, for instance, has known about the existence of Nazi war criminals in the country for decades and yet largely kept quiet about them (Mark Aarons). Some have however speculated that some of the research work done by these Nazi German scientists, now in America, in the area of biological and chemical weapons was tested on African Americans. All these do not in any way justify the Holocaust. Still, Mr. Baidoo should have approached Hitler from the standpoint of comparative methodology in which he also discussed the Catholic Church, the Asiento, the enslavement and extermination of Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, and the enslavement of Africans (Casas; Kiernan) and the role these activities played in developing Western capitalism. Mr. Baidoo’s articles completely ignored Jim Crowism, Nazism, and Apartheid.
That is, we are completely left in the dark about Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of Apartheid, and his possible connections to Nazism and Jim Crowism and free market fundamentalists, such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, propping that diabolical regime. There have been some speculations that Verwoerd designed Apartheid in line with German eugenics, when he studied in Germany, and with Nazi ideology. He may have also have picked up some new ideas about Jim Crowism in America where he studied. Jim Crowism may have informed his creation of Apartheid. In the main Mr. Baidoo did not mention those diabolical scientists, like the Japanese Shiro Ishii, whom the Americans spared in the aftermath of the Second World War (WW2) in exchange for freely sharing their research findings with Americans. This happened in the case of some of the Nazi scientists Americans brought to work in the United States after the war.
LESSONS FROM “MEIN KAMPF” AND THE HOLOCAUST FOR TODAY
Hitler’s controversial book “Mein Kampf” has been at the center of political studies in many institutions. It has shaped the direction of post-Second World War politics, including politics of the Cold War, international relations, German politics and foreign policy strategies, genocide research and scholarship, to mention but a few. For us in Ghana and Africa it has immediate political and sociological relevance in how we live together and respect each other as a people. We are referring to tolerance.
Today in Ghana we have politicians who call on one ethnic group (Asantes) to slaughter other ethnic groups (Gas and Ewes). In Rwanda, it [Rwandan Genocide] began as soon as Hutu Militants (hardliners) and their sympathizers started calling the Tutsis, their fellow brothers and sisters, “cockroaches,” “insects,” “inferior,” and “pests.” Hutu hardliners subsequently called for the extermination of the Tutsis. Yet some of us do not see striking parallels between the behavior of the Nazis/Hutu hardliners and the Holocaust/Rwandan Genocide. This is regrettable for a number of reasons. The Rwandan Genocide in turn spilled into Eastern Congo where the seemingly unending political instability has created ample opportunities for multinational corporations from the capitalist West, particularly America, to cash in on vital minerals it needs for its production of cars, phones, space technology, computers, and the like, without paying taxes to the central government of the Congo.
Not many people are aware that some of the men among the Hutu hardliners directed some of their well-placed sympathizers to register Tutsis in certain Rwandan localities to guarantee their easy identification and swift extermination. This is similar to the task the Nazis gave the Judenrat (“Jewish Council of Elders”) across Europe, at least in those places the Germans occupied during the Second World War. The later discovery of Nazi documents (the Holocaust, eugenics, etc.) in the hands of Hutu hardliners (Kiernan) reinforces Hitler’s legacy and what uncritical imitation of foreign ideas can do to a people. Hutu hardliners and their sympathizers slaughtered the Tutsis and moderate Hutus with a ferocity probably matched by that of the Nazis in their extermination of Gypsies (properly called the Roma), Jews, and others.
The industrial scale of the Nazi extermination camps and gas chambers guaranteed the efficiency of their killing machines (recall that Edwin Black traces the concept of “gas chamber” to American eugenics).
What is more, it is also hardly known by many an individual that Hitler regretted publishing that book as it began giving him problems once he became his country’s Chancellor. It has been reported of Hitler telling his former lawyer Hans Frank in 1938 that “if he had known in 1924 that he was going to become chancellor, he would never have written his book” (Breitman). This is good but his later actions and the publication of “Zweites Buch,” the sequel to “Mein Kampf” which he thought wise never to publish as he did with “Mein Kampf” for fear of additional problems accruing to his chancellorship, cast some doubts on the sincerity of his admission to his lawyer. Anyone who has seen excerpts or even cursorily read portions of “Zweites Buch,” discovered and published by historian Gerhard Weinberg in 1961, would have known that Hitler and the Nazis held the Soviet Union and America in as much contempt perhaps as they did World Jewry.
“Zweites Buch” and “Mein Kampf” define Hitler’s foreign policy strategies for Nazi Germany and the new Germany he intended creating under Nazism. This new Germany is not substantively different from the kind of world White Supremacist William L. Pierce, the founder of the National Alliance, created in his novels “The Turner Diaries (1978)” and “Hunter (1989).”
There is a demoralizing paradox which Hitler’s genocidal instinct gave birth to, which is destroying the high-level industrialization, development, growth, and technical advancement his leadership, even if we are against his racial politics, brought to Germany, Europe, and the rest of the world. German Jews were part and parcel of this golden age of technical advancement of German society. Hitler reversed this golden age. On the other hand, what the Rwandan Genocide has done to the future of Rwanda is incalculable in monetary and psychological terms. The recent xenophobic slaughter of non-native South Africans in South Africa and killings associated with partisan politics in Ghana bespeak the danger intolerance, coupled with historical animosities and poor economic management of national resources and bad leadership and social inequality, breeds in a fragile political economy. A fragile political economy such as the one the Treaty of Versailles created for Germany on account of the reparations burden partially contributed to the rise of Nazism and with it Hitler.
Again some of us are not quick enough to discern a link between the political sentiments undergirding Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and the politics of Boko Haram, Al-Shabab, and the Lord’s Resistance Army. What these terrorist organizations have done is to replace Jews, communists, Gypsies (the Roma), capitalists, the handicapped, Slavs, and other alleged inferior human beings in “Mein Kampf” with non-Muslims and political opponents, the latter in the particular case of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Across Africa politicians are doing similarly via political ethnocentrism and ethnic nationalism. The winner-takes-all democratic capitalism Africa blindly copied from the West reinforces the moral and political paradox inherent in “Mein Kampf.” Yet Germany has recovered from her past blunders and has risen to lead Europe. Why is it that Africa and some of her politicians are assuming that shameful past blunders of Germany by creating the Boko Harams, the Al-Shababs, the Hutu hardliners, and the Lord’s Resistance Armys?
The irony of it all points to other interesting facts. The behavior of Western and non-Western conservative capitalists and the latter’s opposition to concerns raised about the environmental, social justice, equality, women’s issues, responsible capitalism, corporate social responsibility, gun control among many others, reeks of neo-Nazism. The rancid rhetoric of free market fundamentalists such as Lush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly instantiates this social and political paradox. In this light Ghana and Africa can do better than the racist, xenophobic, and social Darwinist prescriptions Hitler advanced in “Mein Kampf” and “Zweites Buch.” After all Hitler and the Nazis did not initiate the Holocaust by constructing gas chambers, concentration and extermination camps.
They began with coordinated staged rhetoric of acidic hatred much as the Hutu Militants and their sympathizers did. Osei Marfo’s outrageous outbursts on ethnocentric regionalism or balkanization, Akufo-Addo’s “All Die Be Die” war cry, and the Zulu King whose xenophobic utterances led to the unfortunate murder of Africans in South Africa all have their negative views imbued with the political character of neo-Nazism. Unfortunately, in some parts of our little world in particular and the world in general it is the political sentiments of “Mein Kampf” and “Zweites Buch” that are gradually coming back in full swing both in subtle and explicit ways. Neo-Nazism need not always have a white face. We have seen that in the persons of Idi Amin, Omar Bashir, Emperor Bokassa, Mobuto Sese Seko, Francisco Nguema, Gnassingbe Eyadema, Joseph Kony, and Charles Taylor…Yoweri Museveni had this to say about Hitler, his hero:
“As Hitler did to bring Germany together, we should also do it here. Hitler was a smart guy, but he went a bit too far for wanting to conquer the world” (The Shariat, Vol. 2, No. 15, April 15-21).
An American-based Ugandan writer and journalist, a friend of ours, implicates Museveni and his capitalist friends from the West in plundering the mineral wealth of Eastern Congo (Allimadi):
“Yet Congolese remain impoverished. Foreign powers allow bandits financed by Rwanda and Uganda to wreak havoc in Congo's eastern region, which contains most of its resources. Under this planned chaos, private corporations enjoy absolute rent; they siphon off Congo's resources through Rwanda and Uganda without paying fees or taxes to the central government.”
Just look at what an African admirer of Hitler and his bloodsucking capitalist vampires doing to Africa and her people!
CONCLUSION
In the end, Mr. Baidoo may have to revise his tattered notes on the history of the Holocaust, including but not limited to, America's contributions to the rise of Nazi Germany and the fact that the Holocaust in Europe began its journey with deep colonial taproots in South West Africa (Namibia). Mr. Baidoo needs to read more on this subject matter. We should like to ask in conclusion: Should Mr. Baidoo not have seen any wisdom in pursuing the speculation that Evan Braun, Hitler’s mistress and then wife, could have descended from Ashkenazi Jews as DNA analysis seems to indicate? Or that Hitler may have had Jewish and possibly African ancestors? We need a better, more nutritious history than the fast-food histories we are currently being fed with.
Usually intellectual obesity, or should we rather say mental atrophy, and debilitating psychological disease states are the end results of agitprop revisionist history of the kind daily propagated on Ghanaweb and other Ghanaian-based fora. Fortunately some of us and several others know better than to fall for these antiquated Hitlerite gimmicks. We are no longer in gas chambers, concentration and exterminations where we are being forced to read Henry Ford’s “The International Jews.”
We shall return…
Additional References
1) "Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur" (Ben Kiernan)
2) "The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and The Colonial Roots of Nazism" (this text deals with the Herero and Namaqua Genocide; readers may also want to read the Whitaker Report (United Nations, 1985)
3) "Hitler’s Black Victim’s: The Historical Experiences of European Blacks, African and African-Americans During the Nazi Era" (Clarence Lusane)
4) "Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler" (Anthony C.Sutton)
5) "Nazi Nexus: America's Corporate Connections to Hitler's Holocaust" (Edwin Black)
6) “IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Corporation" (Expanded Version; Edwin Black)
7) “War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race” (Expanded Version; Edwin Black)
8) “The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics” (An article published in the History News Network (HNN) by Edwin Black (2003)
9) "The Nazi Hydra in America: Suppressed History of the Century-Wall Street and the Rise of the Fourth Reich (Glen Yeadon)
10) "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present" (Harriet Washington)
11) "Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War 2" (Douglas Blackmon)
12) "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" (Michelle Alexander)
13) "Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe Under Nazi Occupation" (Isaiah Trunk)
14) "Project Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America" (Annie Jacobsen).
15) “Sanctuary: Nazi Fugitives in Australia” (Mark Aarons)
16) “Hitler’s Private Library: The Books that Shaped his Life” (Timothy W. Ryback)
17) “Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration” (Michael Dobbs; The Washington Post, July 30, 1998)
18) “Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew” (Richard Breitman)
20) “America’s Nazi Secret: An Insider’s History” (John Loftus)
21) “Hell’s Cartel: I.G. Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine” (Diarmuid Jeffreys)
22) “The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben” (Joseph Borkin)
23) “Patents for Hitler” (Guenter Riemann)
24) “Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, The Nazis, and the Swiss Banks” (Mark Aarons & John Loftus)
25) “Inside I.G. Farben: Hoechst During the Third Reich” (Stephen H. Lindner)
26) “All Honorable Men: The Story of the Men on Both Sides of the Atlantic Who Successfully Thwarted Plans to Dismantle the Nazi Cartel System” (James S. Martin)
27) “Hitler’s Willing Spin Doctors” (Peter Grose; The New York Times, Feb. 28, 1999)
28) “The Choice is Clear: Africa Must Embrace Nkrumah’s Vision and United” (Milton Allimadi; Black Star News, May 26, 2013)
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Joe-Frank 8 years ago
It is pathetic read such a silly comment. This Kwarteng must be very careful.
It is pathetic read such a silly comment. This Kwarteng must be very careful.
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Dear Joe-Frank,
Ask the editor of Ghanaweb why he refuses or finds it so difficult publishing my rebuttals to Baidoo?
Why I had to go and back and forth with for him before (write a number of emails to him) to publish ... read full comment
Dear Joe-Frank,
Ask the editor of Ghanaweb why he refuses or finds it so difficult publishing my rebuttals to Baidoo?
Why I had to go and back and forth with for him before (write a number of emails to him) to publish them, only to remove them from the archives?
Why he gives Baidoo's articles full coverage but does not return the same favor to my rejoinders, particularly the first two of Hitler's Mein Kampf?
Ask the editor why he gave Baidoo's first pieces on Hitler's Mein Kampf full coverage but refused to do the same with two rebuttals to his?
What politics and favoritism is the editor playing with my articles?
I have given you a fraction of records from American, Britain, French, Australian, Japanese, and Russian records and you calling it a pathetic read.
You can find most of the things I said in there in American archival and declassified records (and those of their Western counterparts including Russia and Japan).
I have said nothing that is made up! In fact, there are so many things I did not include from archival and declassified records.
You will be shocked if I should make a series out of this where I exhaustively cover a lot of topics. It will cover books upon books upon books.
Go through my piece again and you will find info on men who prosecuted Nazi war criminals and what they had to write about these things both from their first-hand experiences of prosecuting Nazi war criminals and reading primary sources and those from archival and declassified records.
What I am saying is, what I have written is a billionth of what is in the records. It is scratching the surface like Baidoo does in his shallow articles, though he scratches badly.
What Baidoo wrote about Mein Kampf and Nazism is shoddy. It can't stand anywhere. Ghanaweb will not publish them if I begin to delve into the topic. What I have provided here is merely introductory.
Yet even that Ghanaweb does not want to give it the same coverage it gave Baidoo's Paper One on the same subject. I write the editor series of emails after I had officially sent him a copy, only for him to publish it and then remove it from the archives.
Why did he not do the same to Baidoo's articles (at least Baidoo's first two)? Changing the titles of some of rebuttals to Baidoo's articles sometimes does not even help in my situation.
Ask the editor why he is treating me that way? And ask him why I had to write several emails to him before he publishes some of my essays, particularly some of my rebuttals?
So Joe-Frank, read the references I have provided and they will surely take you primary sources (declassified records and others mainly).
Sometimes our major problem is that we don't want to read enough. Our educational system back home does not enforce or inculcate this in students.
I myself was a victim of this system but had relatives who taught me otherwise while I went through the system. I don't say this to mean I am better. I AM NOT. We are all learning.
This is why I have been encouraging and advising Baidoo to begin reading seriously and critically rather than relying on shallow ring-wing websites for information.
You see why you were not surprised at his series on Hitler's Mein Kampf but surprised to read mine (even though what I have written merely scratches the surface.
Namely, what I have written is introductory I even mentioned a tiny fraction of authoritative references on my piece) and not an in-depth study of Mein Kampf, Nazism, and capitalist support and financing of Hitler and Nazi Germany).
Please tell the editor to republish the article so that others will have the opportunity to read it as he gave Baidoo's first two!
Even his piece on FDR contains too many distortions and analytic errors. And I know the follow-ups are not going to be any different. Let’s wait and see. You may know why later. There are contradictions as well. Continue to read my good brother.
And you should know why Baidoo insults why I don’t insult. I do so because he has told me and others that he’s a grandfather.
This is why I treat him with all the respect he deserves from me as an elderly person. But I will boldly tell him when his argument is childish!
I will even boldly tell him an article of his stupid if indeed it is stupid. But I will not insult him even if he's my age mate. I believe in factual or sound arguments, not insults. Thanks I was never raised to insult people I disagree with.
Sadly, some of the individuals he insults in his articles are human beings who have impacted the world and institutions as most human beings, such as Baidoo and myself, will ever dream of becoming. These are men whose creative and formidable presence have made the world a better place. I am waiting to see when Baidoo is awarded a Nobel Prize for his Ghanaweb articles and shallow articles.
But I still love the man (Baidoo) nonetheless. He is trying his best. That is commendable.
Have a great weekend.
Thanks.
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Dear Readers,
Author: Alan S. Binder (Princeton University. Binder was ex-Vice Federal Reserve Board of Governors, a member of ex-President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, and a Research Associate at the National B ... read full comment
Dear Readers,
Author: Alan S. Binder (Princeton University. Binder was ex-Vice Federal Reserve Board of Governors, a member of ex-President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a Keynesian economist and his and others economic ideas gave America the surplus the Clinton presidency left behind. Baidoo's conservative idol George Bush squandered that surplus).
Title: Keynesian Economics
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Keynesian economics is a theory of total spending in the economy (called aggregate demand) and its effects on output and INFLATION. Although the term has been used (and abused) to describe many things over the years, six principal tenets seem central to Keynesianism. The first three describe how the economy works.
1. A Keynesian believes that aggregate demand is influenced by a host of economic decisions—both public and private—and sometimes behaves erratically. The public decisions include, most prominently, those on monetary and fiscal (i.e., spending and tax) policies. Some decades ago, economists heatedly debated the relative strengths of monetary and fiscal policies, with some Keynesians arguing that MONETARY POLICY is powerless, and some monetarists arguing that FISCAL POLICY is powerless. Both of these are essentially dead issues today. Nearly all Keynesians and monetarists now believe that both fiscal and monetary policies affect aggregate demand. A few economists, however, believe in debt neutrality—the doctrine that substitutions of government borrowing for taxes have no effects on total demand (more on this below).
2. According to Keynesian theory, changes in aggregate demand, whether anticipated or unanticipated, have their greatest short-run effect on real output and employment, not on prices. This idea is portrayed, for example, in PHILLIPS CURVES that show inflation rising only slowly when UNEMPLOYMENT falls. Keynesians believe that what is true about the short run cannot necessarily be inferred from what must happen in the long run, and we live in the short run. They often quote Keynes’s famous statement, “In the long run, we are all dead,” to make the point.
Monetary policy can produce real effects on output and employment only if some prices are rigid—if nominal wages (wages in dollars, not in real purchasing power), for example, do not adjust instantly. Otherwise, an injection of new money would change all prices by the same percentage. So Keynesian models generally either assume or try to explain rigid prices or wages. Rationalizing rigid prices is a difficult theoretical problem because, according to standard microeconomic theory, real supplies and demands should not change if all nominal prices rise or fall proportionally.
But Keynesians believe that, because prices are somewhat rigid, fluctuations in any component of spending—consumption, INVESTMENT, or government expenditures—cause output to fluctuate. If government spending increases, for example, and all other components of spending remain constant, then output will increase. Keynesian models of economic activity also include a so-called multiplier effect; that is, output increases by a multiple of the original change in spending that caused it. Thus, a ten-billion-dollar increase in government spending could cause total output to rise by fifteen billion dollars (a multiplier of 1.5) or by five billion (a multiplier of 0.5). Contrary to what many people believe, Keynesian analysis does not require that the multiplier exceed 1.0. For Keynesian economics to work, however, the multiplier must be greater than zero.
3. Keynesians believe that prices, and especially wages, respond slowly to changes in supply and demand, resulting in periodic shortages and surpluses, especially of labor. Even MILTON FRIEDMAN acknowledged that “under any conceivable institutional arrangements, and certainly under those that now prevail in the United States, there is only a limited amount of flexibility in prices and wages.”1 In current parlance, that would certainly be called a Keynesian position.
No policy prescriptions follow from these three beliefs alone. And many economists who do not call themselves Keynesian would nevertheless accept the entire list. What distinguishes Keynesians from other economists is their belief in the following three tenets about economic policy.
4. Keynesians do not think that the typical level of unemployment is ideal—partly because unemployment is subject to the caprice of aggregate demand, and partly because they believe that prices adjust only gradually. In fact, Keynesians typically see unemployment as both too high on average and too variable, although they know that rigorous theoretical justification for these positions is hard to come by. Keynesians also feel certain that periods of recession or depression are economic maladies, not, as in real business cycle theory, efficient market responses to unattractive opportunities.
5. Many, but not all, Keynesians advocate activist stabilization policy to reduce the amplitude of the business cycle, which they rank among the most important of all economic problems. Here, however, even some conservative Keynesians part company by doubting either the efficacy of stabilization policy or the wisdom of attempting it.
This does not mean that Keynesians advocate what used to be called fine-tuning—adjusting government spending, taxes, and the MONEY SUPPLY every few months to keep the economy at full employment. Almost all economists, including most Keynesians, now believe that the government simply cannot know enough soon enough to fine-tune successfully. Three lags make it unlikely that fine-tuning will work. First, there is a lag between the time that a change in policy is required and the time that the government recognizes this. Second, there is a lag between when the government recognizes that a change in policy is required and when it takes action. In the United States, this lag can be very long for fiscal policy because Congress and the administration must first agree on most changes in spending and taxes. The third lag comes between the time that policy is changed and when the changes affect the economy. This, too, can be many months. Yet many Keynesians still believe that more modest goals for stabilization policy—coarse-tuning, if you will—are not only defensible but sensible. For example, an economist need not have detailed quantitative knowledge of lags to prescribe a dose of expansionary monetary policy when the unemployment rate is very high.
6. Finally, and even less unanimously, some Keynesians are more concerned about combating unemployment than about conquering inflation. They have concluded from the evidence that the costs of low inflation are small. However, there are plenty of anti-inflation Keynesians. Most of the world’s current and past central bankers, for example, merit this title whether they like it or not. Needless to say, views on the relative importance of unemployment and inflation heavily influence the policy advice that economists give and that policymakers accept. Keynesians typically advocate more aggressively expansionist policies than non-Keynesians.
Keynesians’ belief in aggressive government action to stabilize the economy is based on value judgments and on the beliefs that (a) macroeconomic fluctuations significantly reduce economic well-being and (b) the government is knowledgeable and capable enough to improve on the FREE MARKET.
The brief debate between Keynesians and new classical economists in the 1980s was fought primarily over (a) and over the first three tenets of Keynesianism—tenets the monetarists had accepted. New classicals believed that anticipated changes in the money supply do not affect real output; that markets, even the labor market, adjust quickly to eliminate shortages and surpluses; and that BUSINESS CYCLES may be efficient. For reasons that will be made clear below, I believe that the “objective” scientific evidence on these matters points strongly in the Keynesian direction. In the 1990s, the new classical schools also came to accept the view that prices are sticky and that, therefore, the labor market does not adjust as quickly as they previously thought (see NEW CLASSICAL MACROECONOMICS).
Before leaving the realm of definition, I must underscore several glaring and intentional omissions.
First, I have said nothing about the RATIONAL EXPECTATIONS school of thought. Like Keynes himself, many Keynesians doubt that school’s view that people use all available INFORMATION to form their expectations about economic policy. Other Keynesians accept the view. But when it comes to the large issues with which I have concerned myself, nothing much rides on whether or not expectations are rational. Rational expectations do not, for example, preclude rigid prices; rational expectations models with sticky prices are thoroughly Keynesian by my definition. I should note, though, that some new classicals see rational expectations as much more fundamental to the debate.
The second omission is the hypothesis that there is a “natural rate” of unemployment in the long run. Prior to 1970, Keynesians believed that the long-run level of unemployment depended on government policy, and that the government could achieve a low unemployment rate by accepting a high but steady rate of inflation. In the late 1960s, Milton Friedman, a monetarist, and Columbia’s Edmund Phelps, a Keynesian, rejected the idea of such a long-run trade-off on theoretical grounds. They argued that the only way the government could keep unemployment below what they called the “natural rate” was with macroeconomic policies that would continuously drive inflation higher and higher. In the long run, they argued, the unemployment rate could not be below the natural rate. Shortly thereafter, Keynesians like Northwestern’s Robert Gordon presented empirical evidence for Friedman’s and Phelps’s view. Since about 1972 Keynesians have integrated the “natural rate” of unemployment into their thinking. So the natural rate hypothesis played essentially no role in the intellectual ferment of the 1975–1985 period.
Third, I have ignored the choice between monetary and fiscal policy as the preferred instrument of stabilization policy. Economists differ about this and occasionally change sides. By my definition, however, it is perfectly possible to be a Keynesian and still believe either that responsibility for stabilization policy should, in principle, be ceded to the monetary authority or that it is, in practice, so ceded. In fact, most Keynesians today share one or both of those beliefs.
Keynesian theory was much denigrated in academic circles from the mid-1970s until the mid-1980s. It has staged a strong comeback since then, however. The main reason appears to be that Keynesian economics was better able to explain the economic events of the 1970s and 1980s than its principal intellectual competitor, NEW CLASSICAL ECONOMICS.
True to its classical roots, new classical theory emphasizes the ability of a market economy to cure recessions by downward adjustments in wages and prices. The new classical economists of the mid-1970s attributed economic downturns to people’s misperceptions about what was happening to relative prices (such as real wages). Misperceptions would arise, they argued, if people did not know the current price level or inflation rate. But such misperceptions should be fleeting and surely cannot be large in societies in which price indexes are published monthly and the typical monthly inflation rate is less than 1 percent. Therefore, economic downturns, by the early new classical view, should be mild and brief. Yet, during the 1980s most of the world’s industrial economies endured deep and long recessions. Keynesian economics may be theoretically untidy, but it certainly predicts periods of persistent, involuntary unemployment.
According to the early new classical theorists of the 1970s and 1980s, a correctly perceived decrease in the growth of the money supply should have only small effects, if any, on real output. Yet, when the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England announced that monetary policy would be tightened to fight inflation, and then made good on their promises, severe recessions followed in each country. New classicals might claim that the tightening was unanticipated (because people did not believe what the monetary authorities said). Perhaps it was, in part. But surely the broad contours of the restrictive policies were anticipated, or at least correctly perceived as they unfolded. Old-fashioned Keynesian theory, which says that any monetary restriction is contractionary because firms and individuals are locked into fixed-price contracts, not inflation-adjusted ones, seems more consistent with actual events.
An offshoot of new classical theory formulated by Harvard’s Robert Barro is the idea of debt neutrality (see GOVERNMENT DEBT AND DEFICITS). Barro argues that inflation, unemployment, real GNP, and real national SAVING should not be affected by whether the government finances its spending with high taxes and low deficits or with low taxes and high deficits. Because people are rational, he argues, they will correctly perceive that low taxes and high deficits today must mean higher future taxes for them and their heirs. They will, Barro argues, cut consumption and increase their saving by one dollar for each dollar increase in future tax liabilities. Thus, a rise in private saving should offset any increase in the government’s deficit. Naïve Keynesian analysis, by contrast, sees an increased deficit, with government spending held constant, as an increase in aggregate demand. If, as happened in the United States in the early 1980s, the stimulus to demand is nullified by contractionary monetary policy, real INTEREST RATES should rise strongly. There is no reason, in the Keynesian view, to expect the private saving rate to rise.
The massive U.S. tax cuts between 1981 and 1984 provided something approximating a laboratory test of these alternative views. What happened? The private saving rate did not rise. Real interest rates soared. With fiscal stimulus offset by monetary contraction, real GNP growth was approximately unaffected; it grew at about the same rate as it had in the recent past. Again, this all seems more consistent with Keynesian than with new classical theory.
Finally, there was the European depression of the 1980s, the worst since the depression of the 1930s. The Keynesian explanation is straightforward. Governments, led by the British and German central banks, decided to fight inflation with highly restrictive monetary and fiscal policies. The anti-inflation crusade was strengthened by the European monetary system, which, in effect, spread the stern German monetary policy all over Europe. The new classical school has no comparable explanation. New classicals, and conservative economists in general, argue that European governments interfere more heavily in labor markets (with high unemployment benefits, for example, and restrictions on firing workers). But most of these interferences were in place in the early 1970s, when unemployment was extremely low.
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francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Hello Readers,
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Milton Friedman, who has died aged 94, was not the mo ... read full comment
Hello Readers,
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Milton Friedman, who has died aged 94, was not the most important economist of the post-war era - that title belongs to the brilliant Paul Samuelson - but he was certainly the most controversial. Yet despite his views being championed by so many politicians on the right, it may come as a surprise that Friedman's career as a policymaker largely ended in failure.
Given his status as a long-standing hate figure, the assumption by many of the left is that his agenda was cemented into place during the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the early 1980s, especially Friedman's well-known view that inflation is solely influenced by changes in the money supply. But very few of Friedman's most cherished proposals were ever put in to practice. Of those that where - such as monetarism - almost all turned into failure.
The great irony for Friedman's fans is that the one piece of public policy he was responsible for that was widely and internationally adopted was one that greatly increased the ability of central governments to collect taxes - a policy he later repudiated in disgust.
Obituaries of Friedman will doubtlessly sing of his successes. But close examination will show them to be few, and none unalloyed. For all his high public profile - thanks to his regular column in Newsweek and series on US television, Free To Choose, which made him into something of a star - today no mainstream academic economist is a monetarist and Friedman left no lasting school of academic heirs. Even the "Chicago school" at the University of Chicago has waned in influence, eclipsed by the mighty MIT army of economists that followed Samuelson.
Of course Friedman is greatly respected for his theoretical work as an economist, especially on his analysis of the role of money, the importance of inflation expectations in wages and employment, and perhaps his most lasting contribution (it could be argued), the permanent income hypothesis, which suggests that households take a longer view of anticipating their past and future income than previously thought. His award of a Nobel prize in economics was richly deserved - even if he was churlish in accepting it (he said after winning: "I would not want a professional judgment of my scientific work to be those seven people who selected me for the award").
In terms of the policies he inspired or influenced, however, the report card is not so glowing. His great claim, the idea that "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon" may have set off the Monetarist versus Keynesian "econ-wars" of the late 1970s and 1980s. But Friedman's ideas of directly targeting the money supply were tried and rejected as a failure, in both the UK and the US, and Friedman himself backed away from his dogmatic earlier positions. Today, no major central bank directly targets money supply data in setting monetary policy - instead they are far more pragmatic. Even Friedman's great admirer Alan Greenspan never tied himself to the monetarist mast, preferring to keep his options open.
Friedman also railed long and hard for school vouchers to be adopted, to little avail, and his libertarian leanings provoked him to call for recreational drugs and prostitution to be legalised. He lobbied against environmental protection and regulations of all kinds, the vast majority of which were happily ignored by his friends and enemies. Even the economic reforms in Pinochet's Chile he is said to have inspired have run into trouble.
Friedman's first big role as a policy advisor came in 1964 to Barry Goldwater - the least successful Republican presidential candidate in the last 100 years. His next gig was for Richard Nixon - an unsuccessful president in a different way - although Nixon ignored him when it mattered, except when he could use Friedman as cover for politically difficult decisions, such as ending compulsory military service.
And Friedman's one success? In 1942, during world war two, Friedman actually went to work for the US government. While there he helped design the payroll tax that in Britain is known as PAYE, Pay As You Earn, and in the US as withholding tax, the system that allows the government to administer the taking of income tax directly from salaries and pay packets. Unlike everything else he argued for, withholding tax was withstood the test of time and is in use all around the world. It was the best thing that Keynesian-style government could ever have wished for, and Friedman bitterly regretted it. In his memoirs he wrote:
"It never occurred to me at the time that I was helping to develop machinery that would make possible a government that I would come to criticize severely as too large, too intrusive, too destructive of freedom. Yet, that is precisely what I was doing. [My wife] Rose has repeatedly chided me over the years about the role that I played in making possible the current overgrown government we both criticize so strongly."
Rest in peace Milton Friedman, big government's best friend.
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By Paul Krugman,
"At research seminars, people don't take Keynesian theorising seriously anymore; the audience starts to whisper and giggle to one another." So declared Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago, writing in 1980. At the time, Lucas was arguably the world's most influential macroeconomist; the influence of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist whose theory of recessions dominated economic policy for a generation after the Second World War, seemed to be virtually at an end.
But Keynes, it turns out, is having the last giggle. Lucas's "rational expectations" theory of booms and slumps has shown itself to be completely useless in the current world crisis. Not only does it offer no guide for action, but it more or less asserts that market economies cannot possibly experience the kind of problems they are, in fact, experiencing. Keynesian economics, on the other hand, which was created precisely to make sense of times like these, looks better than ever.
But while Keynesianism is experiencing a revival, there are major questions about just what needs to be revived. Many economists agree that their field went off track, that in some important ways it lost touch with reality, and that a return to some of the ideas Keynes laid out more than 70 years ago is part of the cure for what ails us. But there is much less agreement about what, exactly, needs to change in the way we think about matters economic.
In this book, Robert Skidelsky, the great biographer of Keynes, searches for clues in the original work of "the master". The book is part critique of the current state of economics, part biographical sketch (it's worth your time just for Chapter 3, "The Lives of Keynes"), part programme for the future.
It also offers a brief but compelling account of the anti-Keynesian counter-revolution, the movement that began with Milton Friedman and reached its apex with Lucas's whispers and giggles. Skidelsky's book is an important contribution at a time of soul-searching, a must read even if one doesn't fully accept its conclusions.
As you might guess, I do, in fact, have some questions about Skidelsky's conclusions, though not so much about how we got here as about what we do next. And those questions, in turn, centre on a long-running dispute over what Keynesian economics are really about.
In Part I of his 1936 masterwork, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Keynes asserted that the core of his theory was the rejection of Say's Law, the doctrine that said that income is automatically spent. If it were true, Say's Law would imply that all the things we usually talk about when trying to assess the economy's direction, like the state of consumer or investor confidence, are irrelevant; one way or another, people will spend all the income coming in. Keynes showed, however, that Say's Law isn't true, because in a monetary economy people can try to accumulate cash rather than real goods. And when everyone is trying to accumulate cash at the same time, which is what happened worldwide after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the result is an end to demand, which produces a severe recession.
Some of those who consider themselves Keynesians, myself included, agree with what Keynes said in The General Theory, and consider the rejection of Say's Law the core issue. On this view, Keynesian economics is primarily a theory designed to explain how market economies can remain persistently depressed.
But there's an alternative interpretation of what Keynes was all about, one offered by Keynes himself in an article published in 1937, a year after The General Theory. Here, Keynes suggested that the core of his insight lay in the acknowledgement that there is uncertainty in the world – uncertainty that cannot be reduced to statistical probabilities, what the former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld called "unknown unknowns". This irreducible uncertainty, he argued, lies behind panics and bouts of exuberance and primarily accounts for the instability of market economies.
In this book, Skidelsky puts himself in the camp of those who argue, in effect, that Keynes 1937, not Keynes 1936, is the man to listen to – that Keynesianism is, or should be, essentially about uncertainty and how it leads to economic instability. And from this he draws some radical conclusions.
Most strikingly, Skidelsky declares that the traditional division between microeconomics and macroeconomics, which is based on whether one focuses on individual markets or on the overall economy, is all wrong; macroeconomics should be defined as the field that studies those areas of economic life in which irreducible uncertainty, uncertainty that cannot be tamed with statistics, dominates. He goes so far as to call for a complete division of postgraduate studies: departments of macroeconomics should not even teach microeconomics, or vice versa, because macroeconomists must be protected "from the encroachment of the methods and habits of mind of microeconomics".
How far should we be willing to follow Skidelsky in this? I think we must trust the biographer in his assessment of Keynes himself; Skidelsky argues persuasively that Keynes spent much of his life deeply focused upon, even obsessed with, the question of how one acts in the face of uncertainty, which is why Keynes 1937 comes closer to the essence of the great man's own thinking.
That's not the same thing, however, as saying that Keynes was right – even about his own contribution. Surely it's possible to make the case for a less profound reconstruction of economics than Skidelsky advocates. I'd point out that behavioural economists, who drop the assumption of perfect rationality but don't seem much concerned by the essential unknowability of the future, have done relatively well at making sense of this crisis; I'd also point out that current disputes over economic policy, above all about the usefulness of government spending to promote employment, seem to be primarily about Say's Law – that is, Keynes 1936.
No matter. You don't have to agree with everything Skidelsky says to find this a wonderfully stimulating book, one that reflects the author's unparalleled erudition. We're living in the second Age of Keynes – and Robert Skidelsky is still the guide of choice.
•Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for economics last year.
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Kojo T 8 years ago
Francis dodo waste your time on this simplistic and superficial analysis.PKB and to an extent you, yourselve need to devote your abundant energy and thoughts to how Ghana and Africa can take its rightful place economically an ... read full comment
Francis dodo waste your time on this simplistic and superficial analysis.PKB and to an extent you, yourselve need to devote your abundant energy and thoughts to how Ghana and Africa can take its rightful place economically and socially in the world China has done it and if 60 yrs after independence we need Indians or Chinese to build our roads and we have to import food there is something wrong.FDR found SOLUTIONS for the Americans and Keynes found solutions to problems PKB wastes time debunking them Who cares Typical African with a lot of baloney
Philip Kobina Baidoo 8 years ago
Hello Kojo, I don't think you are being fair. How can you rubbish what I have written, and in the same breathe ask me to use my abundant energy to provide solutions to the Ghanaian problem produced by socialist ideas? Check y ... read full comment
Hello Kojo, I don't think you are being fair. How can you rubbish what I have written, and in the same breathe ask me to use my abundant energy to provide solutions to the Ghanaian problem produced by socialist ideas? Check your premise before you put in your request. Thank you.
JATO KWASHIVI RAWLINGS 8 years ago
KWARTENG AND HIS PAL KOJO T, ARE JUST ENGAGED IN AN ACADEMIC EXERCISE FOR THE BOOK SHELVES. WHAT KWARTENG WRITES IS OF NO PRACTICAL USE, IN DEALING WITH HUMANKIND'S PROBLEMS OF ILLITERACY, HUMGER AND DISEASE. THESE TWO BEDFEL ... read full comment
KWARTENG AND HIS PAL KOJO T, ARE JUST ENGAGED IN AN ACADEMIC EXERCISE FOR THE BOOK SHELVES. WHAT KWARTENG WRITES IS OF NO PRACTICAL USE, IN DEALING WITH HUMANKIND'S PROBLEMS OF ILLITERACY, HUMGER AND DISEASE. THESE TWO BEDFELLOWS ARE WHIPPING A DEAD HORSE OF SOCIALISM, FOR ALL WE CARE. THEY ARE BREATHING AND LIVING WELL IN WESTERN DEMOCRACIES AND PROPOUNDING DEAD THEORIES AND IDEOLOGIES OF NO USE TO THE LIVING IN OUR WORLD TODAY.
Kwasi Amoah 8 years ago
Mr Baidoo, this is a personal appeal. Can you please end this series before Kwarteng loses his mind. Because I think the guy is losing it.
Mr Baidoo, this is a personal appeal. Can you please end this series before Kwarteng loses his mind. Because I think the guy is losing it.
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Dear Amoah,
My mind is as fertile and strong as ever.
Baidoo is not someone I sweat very much over.
I am familiar with his terrain and familiar with almost all his sources, including the ring-wing ones he visits an ... read full comment
Dear Amoah,
My mind is as fertile and strong as ever.
Baidoo is not someone I sweat very much over.
I am familiar with his terrain and familiar with almost all his sources, including the ring-wing ones he visits and comes to Ghanaweb to present them as his own.
I like doing this because these are things I take for granted. I don't rate him high as some of you do.I see him as an ordinary writer.
Nothing serious really. It is always good to deal with when time allows so that the gullible on Ghanaweb know his lies and distortions.
I hope you have realized by now how the editor of Ghanaweb is playing with my rebuttals to Baidoo's articles on Hitler's Mein Kampf. They post it and quickly remove from the page and archives. I write series of emails to him and publishes only to take them off.
What sort of politics is that? So don't worry. I can easily handle Baidoo. I can assure you that he's one of easiest targets on Ghanaweb.
I have met and known more knowledgeable or better informed men and women than Baidoo. Baidoo is not one of them.
Thanks.
Nana Appiah 8 years ago
francis kwarteng, are you very sure everything is ok with you?
francis kwarteng, are you very sure everything is ok with you?
Philip Kobina Baidoo 8 years ago
Hello Mr Amoah, I am sorry; I have to see this through. I hope it does not bother you that much. Thank you
Hello Mr Amoah, I am sorry; I have to see this through. I hope it does not bother you that much. Thank you
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Baidoo,
I am not daydreaming. Hahahahahaha...
Remember I ask you to do this in the hundred years to come? I hope you have not forgotten my advice! I keep ssaying you Baidoo have not said anything serious yet. Hahahahah ... read full comment
Baidoo,
I am not daydreaming. Hahahahahaha...
Remember I ask you to do this in the hundred years to come? I hope you have not forgotten my advice! I keep ssaying you Baidoo have not said anything serious yet. Hahahahahahaha...
Continue and pay Kwasi Appiah no mind. He is merely having fun. Aren't you having fun yourself, Baidoo?
Keep it up! Well, I am stepping out to take fresh air. Come and join me!
Have a great weekend.
Thanks.
KKO 8 years ago
Kwasi,
PKB's is a very useful exercise. For a non-economist, I have learnt a lot and he has actually set me off to studying some history of Europe and the United States. But even more importantly, PKB has shown clearly why s ... read full comment
Kwasi,
PKB's is a very useful exercise. For a non-economist, I have learnt a lot and he has actually set me off to studying some history of Europe and the United States. But even more importantly, PKB has shown clearly why socialism has never worked anywhere and will never work in any African country, particularly in view of the fact it has always come along with the abuse of the rights of the very people it is meant to help.
Unfortunately, instead of dealing with the substance of the matter that PKB raises, the Nkurmaists simply copy and past irrelevances. Personally I stopped reading Kwarteng's articles and postings the moment he defended Kwame Nkrumah's obnoxious Prevention Detention Act!
back door director 8 years ago
These are exercises in futility. What have you achieved to be a peer reviewer.
These are exercises in futility. What have you achieved to be a peer reviewer.
JD 8 years ago
Philip has the right and time to waste on and write pointless articles. To be fair, his initial articles seem thought - provoking, but now he seems to be captured by his own glory. I stopped reading them ages ago. He and Kwar ... read full comment
Philip has the right and time to waste on and write pointless articles. To be fair, his initial articles seem thought - provoking, but now he seems to be captured by his own glory. I stopped reading them ages ago. He and Kwarteng, my man, should get a room to cuddle. That might be far more beneficial than these ongoing intellectual fuse and indulgence in 'ivory towerism'.
Philip Kobina Baidoo 8 years ago
I love that JD. Sometimes a bit of humour breaks the ice. I hope I am right on your drift. Thank you
I love that JD. Sometimes a bit of humour breaks the ice. I hope I am right on your drift. Thank you
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
JD,
Have you wondered why the editor of Ghanaweb has been refusing to publish my rebuttals to Baidoo?
I have been going back and forth with the editor, only for him to publish them and then remove them from the archive ... read full comment
JD,
Have you wondered why the editor of Ghanaweb has been refusing to publish my rebuttals to Baidoo?
I have been going back and forth with the editor, only for him to publish them and then remove them from the archives?
I wrote about ten emails asking why he refused to publish my rebuttals even as he published Baidoo's? I have no idea what is going on?
Thanks.
Dr. Otto 8 years ago
Ghanaweb must completely ban Francis Kwarteng from posting articles to the website.
I find it very reasonable that Ghanaweb has thrashed the article posted today by Francis Kwarteng, captioned: Re: Nkrumahism, The Can Of W ... read full comment
Ghanaweb must completely ban Francis Kwarteng from posting articles to the website.
I find it very reasonable that Ghanaweb has thrashed the article posted today by Francis Kwarteng, captioned: Re: Nkrumahism, The Can Of Worms I Opened - Hitler's "Mein Kamp 1"
Kwarteng rings Semi-Educated, with his nose high, too known, primitive, conservative and to crown all very stupid.
Philip Kobina Baidoo 8 years ago
Hello Dr. Otto, I think I disagree with you on this one. This is what I have been fighting for, the freedom of expression. This is what his idol, Nkrumah, denied Ghanaians, and it is the basis of my objection to his philosoph ... read full comment
Hello Dr. Otto, I think I disagree with you on this one. This is what I have been fighting for, the freedom of expression. This is what his idol, Nkrumah, denied Ghanaians, and it is the basis of my objection to his philosophy. I don't like what Mr Kwarteng writes, but I think he has the right to publish his opinion. It becomes counter productive, because what I am fighting for is freedom. Thank you and no hard feelings.
KING LOMOTEY 8 years ago
What do both Kwarteng and Baidoo have to offer in these self-serving debates to benefit Ghana? A question I implore Ghanaweb to answer as soon as practicable.
What do both Kwarteng and Baidoo have to offer in these self-serving debates to benefit Ghana? A question I implore Ghanaweb to answer as soon as practicable.
PhiIip Kobina Baidoo 8 years ago
Hello King Lomotey, it is not self-serving. Probably you have not been following the marathon from the beginning. Personally, I am trying to debunk socialism, because I strongly believe that it does not work, and what Mr Kwar ... read full comment
Hello King Lomotey, it is not self-serving. Probably you have not been following the marathon from the beginning. Personally, I am trying to debunk socialism, because I strongly believe that it does not work, and what Mr Kwarteng has been doing is to counter what I write. All the things that I have been writing about were raise by Mr Kwarteng in one of his earlier rejoinders. So I am not just engaging in some abstract thoughts to serve my own personal indulgence. They are relevant to my mission of exposing the inadequacies of socialism. I hope this defuses a bit of your outrage. Thank you.
Philip Kobina Baidoo 8 years ago
Hello King Lomotey, it is not self-serving. Probably you have not been following the marathon from the beginning. Personally, I am trying to debunk socialism, because I strongly believe that it does not work, and what Mr Kwar ... read full comment
Hello King Lomotey, it is not self-serving. Probably you have not been following the marathon from the beginning. Personally, I am trying to debunk socialism, because I strongly believe that it does not work, and what Mr Kwarteng has been doing is to counter what I write. All the things that I have been writing about were raise by Mr Kwarteng in one of his earlier rejoinders. So I am not just engaging in some abstract thoughts to serve my own personal indulgence. They are relevant to my mission of exposing the inadequacies of socialism. I hope this defuses a bit of your outrage. Thank you.
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Baidoo,
Hahahahahaha...Baidoo tell King Lomotey that your childish rants has nothing to do with anything I said about socialism. Tell them what my primary concern is about Keynesian economics ("mixed economy"), which is w ... read full comment
Baidoo,
Hahahahahaha...Baidoo tell King Lomotey that your childish rants has nothing to do with anything I said about socialism. Tell them what my primary concern is about Keynesian economics ("mixed economy"), which is what the world knows (see below).
And Keynesian economics is neither socialism/communism nor the unworkable paper capitalism you rants are about. Tell King Lomotey to go and read "Philip Kobina Baidoo, Jr.'s Approach to Nkrumahism is Questionable" (Ghanaweb, Jan 30, 2015) to see for themselves what my arguments were about. My arguments had nothing to do with your childish rants.
All I argued for is bringing the best of economic theories in one place. This is what every economy (perhps except North Korea) has been doing for since the days of classical economics.
Your childish rants are merely distorions and misrepresentations of the arguments I made in that aforesaid essay. Tell King Lomotey and others to go and read it.
Even Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan moved away from some of the major features of paper captalism you are talking.
You see why none of my rebuttals has directly confronted your views on capitalism or socialism?
Because the capitalism you describe has does not exist anywhere. Neither is your communism. You should have know by now how some of your unworkable paper capitlists ended up building and running some of Hitler's gas chambers and extermination camps.
I guess the free market you have been arguing for benefitted these paper capitalists of yours. Go and ask why the world's major central banks are running from your paper capitalism and running towards Keynesian economics!
All I have been championing is mixed economy, which is what the world knows, not the paper capitalism you have been describing about. And your paper capitalism has not worked anywhere.
Not even Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations," the Bible of right wings dogmatically supports that paper capitalism. You will know why in due course.
In case you have forgotten, let me remind you what I said to you and readers in y article "Why Philip Kobina Baidoo, Jr.'s Approach To Nkrumahism is Questionable" (Ghanaweb, Jan, 30, 2015):
"Finally, we may want to stress that we have adopted a centrist position on the question of political economy because neither capitalism nor socialism (and communism) is the best for every society, or has all the answers. The Nordic Model or Nkrumah’s “mixed economy” may hold the key to unraveling Africa’s economic success if we are willing to study the Beijing Consensus and the Nordic Model."
You should learn to stop misrepresenting the views of others. You have this problem with others on Ghanaweb in the comment section.
And Keynesian economics is not communism or the paper captalism you have been spending your time writing about. It has never existed or worked anywhere.
And when you are done tell the world why all the world's major economies (central banks) are running to Keynesian economics.
Also tell the world why Milton Friedman's (perhaps the world's most famous free market fundamentalist) work incidentally contributed to Keynesian economics.
Why Richard Nizon, a stubborn free market fundamentalist, tell Americans and the world at large "WE ARE KEYNESIANS NOW."
Why all the world's major central banks/economies and global institutions like the World Bank, Wall Street, Hong Kong and European/Asian Stock Exchanges use economic/econometric models embracing Keynesian economics as the Wall Street Journal says here (I am talking about Keynesian economics, not your unworkable paper capitalism or communism; Remember Lawrence Klein was a Keynesian economics):
"Mr. Klein, who died Sunday at age 93, was the recipient of the 1980 Nobel Prize in economics for his pioneering work on econometric models.
He ushered forecasting from academia into the realm of business, said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist of IHS Global Insight, the firm that ultimately evolved from the groundbreaking forecasting operation founded by Mr. Klein.
Mr. Klein "was the first to create the statistical models that embodied Keynesian economics, an important influential tool that is still used by the Federal Reserve and other central banks, as well as by private forecasters," Harvard professor Martin Feldstein said Monday...
A promising economist from a young age, Mr. Klein correctly predicted that the U.S. economy would prosper after World War II thanks to increased consumer demand, rather than return to recession as some economists feared. The prediction helped lend credibility to econometric modeling, then in an early stage of development...
He "early on figured out commercial applications," Mr. Behravesh said. The firm's early clients included General Electric Co. , International Business Machines Corp. , Bethlehem Steel Corp. and Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey.
His computer-driven models, some of which now factor in almost 2,000 economic variables, are used today by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other institutions, Mr. Behravesh said.
Other economists recalled Mr. Klein's collegiality with fellow academics and students. "He was enormously generous to younger scholars," said Benjamin Friedman, a professor of political economy at Harvard and former chairman of the school's economics department. "He was a combination of a great intellect who contributed enormously to economic scholarship—a marvelously generous, big-hearted human being...
In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Mr. Klein was the recipient in 1959 of the John Bates Clark Medal, an award from the American Economic Association for contributions by an economist under age 40. In his Nobel citation, the prize committee stated that "few, if any, research workers in the empirical field of economic science, have had so many successors and such a large impact as Lawrence Klein."
He later served as president of the American Economic Association. An awards in his name is presented annually by Arizona State University's business school...
Olivier Blanchard, the IMF's economic counselor and director of its research department, said Monday: "Larry Klein moved macroeconomics from qualitative to quantitative descriptions, based on econometric estimation of relations between macroeconomic variables. At the time, this was quite a tour de force. Macroeconomics was never the same after that."
Baidoo tell the world why the world is so fascinated with Keynesian economics? Most of your paper capitalist ideas have failed. Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz thoroyghly researched this very question and shown why your Washington Consensus has virtually failed whereever it it has been introduced!
Please read and read and read and stop daydreaming. I have never liked daydreaming. We are not living beyond Pluto. Even the world's major central banks and international bodies like the World Bank/IMF are revising their attiduted toward the Washington Consensus, your paper capitalism. Stop daydreaming.
Thanks.
KING LOMOTEY 8 years ago
I will advise both you and Baidoo to read Robert Costanza and Herman Daly and how they debunk neo-classical economics.
Ecological accounting will help Ghana and Africa a lot. Please read "For the Common Good - Redirecting th ... read full comment
I will advise both you and Baidoo to read Robert Costanza and Herman Daly and how they debunk neo-classical economics.
Ecological accounting will help Ghana and Africa a lot. Please read "For the Common Good - Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, and the Environment".
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
I have read both. Are you talking about futuristics?
I have read both. Are you talking about futuristics?
Dear Readers,
The Soviet Union, Britain, France, and South America (with the aid of the Catholic Church and Western power) harbored Nazi scientists, etc. I forgot to mention this. Now let me add this:
1) For those inter ...
read full comment
It is pathetic read such a silly comment. This Kwarteng must be very careful.
Dear Joe-Frank,
Ask the editor of Ghanaweb why he refuses or finds it so difficult publishing my rebuttals to Baidoo?
Why I had to go and back and forth with for him before (write a number of emails to him) to publish ...
read full comment
Dear Readers,
Author: Alan S. Binder (Princeton University. Binder was ex-Vice Federal Reserve Board of Governors, a member of ex-President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, and a Research Associate at the National B ...
read full comment
Hello Readers,
........................................................................................................................................................
Milton Friedman, who has died aged 94, was not the mo ...
read full comment
Francis dodo waste your time on this simplistic and superficial analysis.PKB and to an extent you, yourselve need to devote your abundant energy and thoughts to how Ghana and Africa can take its rightful place economically an ...
read full comment
Hello Kojo, I don't think you are being fair. How can you rubbish what I have written, and in the same breathe ask me to use my abundant energy to provide solutions to the Ghanaian problem produced by socialist ideas? Check y ...
read full comment
KWARTENG AND HIS PAL KOJO T, ARE JUST ENGAGED IN AN ACADEMIC EXERCISE FOR THE BOOK SHELVES. WHAT KWARTENG WRITES IS OF NO PRACTICAL USE, IN DEALING WITH HUMANKIND'S PROBLEMS OF ILLITERACY, HUMGER AND DISEASE. THESE TWO BEDFEL ...
read full comment
Mr Baidoo, this is a personal appeal. Can you please end this series before Kwarteng loses his mind. Because I think the guy is losing it.
Dear Amoah,
My mind is as fertile and strong as ever.
Baidoo is not someone I sweat very much over.
I am familiar with his terrain and familiar with almost all his sources, including the ring-wing ones he visits an ...
read full comment
francis kwarteng, are you very sure everything is ok with you?
Hello Mr Amoah, I am sorry; I have to see this through. I hope it does not bother you that much. Thank you
Baidoo,
I am not daydreaming. Hahahahahaha...
Remember I ask you to do this in the hundred years to come? I hope you have not forgotten my advice! I keep ssaying you Baidoo have not said anything serious yet. Hahahahah ...
read full comment
Kwasi,
PKB's is a very useful exercise. For a non-economist, I have learnt a lot and he has actually set me off to studying some history of Europe and the United States. But even more importantly, PKB has shown clearly why s ...
read full comment
These are exercises in futility. What have you achieved to be a peer reviewer.
Philip has the right and time to waste on and write pointless articles. To be fair, his initial articles seem thought - provoking, but now he seems to be captured by his own glory. I stopped reading them ages ago. He and Kwar ...
read full comment
I love that JD. Sometimes a bit of humour breaks the ice. I hope I am right on your drift. Thank you
JD,
Have you wondered why the editor of Ghanaweb has been refusing to publish my rebuttals to Baidoo?
I have been going back and forth with the editor, only for him to publish them and then remove them from the archive ...
read full comment
Ghanaweb must completely ban Francis Kwarteng from posting articles to the website.
I find it very reasonable that Ghanaweb has thrashed the article posted today by Francis Kwarteng, captioned: Re: Nkrumahism, The Can Of W ...
read full comment
Hello Dr. Otto, I think I disagree with you on this one. This is what I have been fighting for, the freedom of expression. This is what his idol, Nkrumah, denied Ghanaians, and it is the basis of my objection to his philosoph ...
read full comment
What do both Kwarteng and Baidoo have to offer in these self-serving debates to benefit Ghana? A question I implore Ghanaweb to answer as soon as practicable.
Hello King Lomotey, it is not self-serving. Probably you have not been following the marathon from the beginning. Personally, I am trying to debunk socialism, because I strongly believe that it does not work, and what Mr Kwar ...
read full comment
Hello King Lomotey, it is not self-serving. Probably you have not been following the marathon from the beginning. Personally, I am trying to debunk socialism, because I strongly believe that it does not work, and what Mr Kwar ...
read full comment
Baidoo,
Hahahahahaha...Baidoo tell King Lomotey that your childish rants has nothing to do with anything I said about socialism. Tell them what my primary concern is about Keynesian economics ("mixed economy"), which is w ...
read full comment
I will advise both you and Baidoo to read Robert Costanza and Herman Daly and how they debunk neo-classical economics.
Ecological accounting will help Ghana and Africa a lot. Please read "For the Common Good - Redirecting th ...
read full comment
I have read both. Are you talking about futuristics?