Re: new thread: PKT and ecology

[Clifford Poirot <cpoirot@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tim Canova wrote:

my response:  i won't name names, but i have read PKTers in the Nation
and
American Prospect accepting the premise that we were at full employment.

My reply:
This is unfortunate, but I see no need to shrink from names. Why not provide
the references. I would like to read those articles. I will say however, in
defense of PKT and heterodox economics in general, that the method and
models are there to deal with the issues. So yes, I agree you are right to
goad the list into thinking about this issue, but I disagree with what I
take to be an implied point that PKT cannot deal with it.

Some of this is definitional no doubt. There is a need to deal with the
problems of long run structural unemployment that may not be measured.
Notably, a lot of this is done by Keynesian structuralists and others who
implicitly adopt vaguely Keynesian approaches. Specifically, I am thinking
of Ingrid Rima's work on dual labor markets and structural unemployment.
This, btw, is exactly why Post-Keynesians need a theory of price and wage
stickiness. But we need to go beyond just "price and wage" stickiness to
understanding the institutional, technological and historical reasons for
long run structural unemployment.

>Clifford Poirot writes:
>I never cease to be amazed at what we have accepted in the name of the
war
>on drugs. Could you have a Keynesian analysis of the Drug War? . . .
>The drug war is a much harder nut to crack. It is not about
Keynesianism,
>and only partially about race. Deep down it is about Americans'
peculiar
>sense of morality. How Keynesian economists can address that, I do not
know.

Tim Canova's response:
The peculiar sense of morality to which you refer is peculiar because of
its
racial bias.  80 million Americans have "experimented" with illegal
drugs,
but the population convicted of drug offenses is disproportionately
black
and brown.  Clinton, Gore, George W. have all explicitly or implicitly
conceded past drug use.  They can vote, even hold office.  Those at the
bottom of the social hierarchy, those who cannot afford expensive legal
counsel, are the ones who end up convicted of drug-related felonies and
sometimes lose their voting rights for life.

My response:
Yes. I agree entirely that there is racism in enforcement of drug laws. For
example, it is now proven that New Jersey engaged in racial profiling for
traffic stops on the Interstate as a pretext for searches. I agree, the
racial disparity in drug sentencing should be addressed. Amazingly, little
attention is given to this by many organizations.

But the other point I am making is that the very impetus behind prohibition
itself is driven by peculiarly American conceptions of morality. There is a
much wider issue that concerns me here and that is one of interpretations of
the Constitution and views of personal freedom and liberty. But I am
probably straying into an area here beyond the focus of the forum.

I would hazard to guess (very unscientifically) that most heterodox
economists, including PKT'ers, believe the degree of criminalization of drug
use is unwarranted and find many features of the drug war objectionable.
However, for reasons that are unclear to me (or perhaps I am just ignorant
of an existing body of work)the only major economist to really point to the
destructiveness of the drug war is Friedman.

In the interest of brevity I would argue that there is a place for society
to regulate drugs but that a more rational and productive fashion is in the
harm reduction approach of the Netherlands.

Tim Canova wrote:
There could certainly be a recognition (consistent with Keynesian) that
the
underperforming economy in the drug consuming and drug producing regions
has
led to rational economic behavior of producing drugs and the irrational
behavior of consuming drugs.

My response:
Prebisch addressed the long run tendency of basic commodity export prices
for developing nations to fall. Thus, it is not hard to see why Colombian
peasants turn from exporting coffee to exporting coca. Agreed that there is
an immense amount of work on the political economy of drug production that
needs to be done.

Similarly, one can start with a lot of the existing empirical literature on
African American immigration from the South coinciding with the decline in
unskilled and semi-skilled jobs.