Re: Samuelson = heretic ?

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

I wrote:
another element (for the US, the capitalist world hegemon) was the rise of the large peace-time military, the "warfare state," so that his "modern mixed economy was (Jim O'Connor's) "warfare-welfare state."

Where did James O'Connor first use this _expression_ "warfare-welfare state" ? Was it in his book Fiscal Crisis of the State ?

Jurriaan: >As far as I remember, at the end of world war 2 Paul Samuelson thought that capitalism was doomed, whereas around 1970 he said that the problem of cyclical economic fluctuations had now been solved.<

No, I doubt that it happened that way. It's possible that he believed -- as a student of Alvin Hansen (a secular stagnation theorist) -- that a recession was quite likely after WW2. But that's different from capitalism being "doomed." In fact, about that time, he proposed the "neoclassical synthesis," in which Keynesian policies would maintain full employment, so that neoclassical scarcity-driven theories would apply. Then, as the post-war long boom progressed, he became more and more confident. I believe he was one of those who declared the business cycle "dead" in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

Jim Devine