1. does it make a difference whether government spending is on digging holes or infrastructural revitalization (or military), etc. not in what some of us call 'Big G Keynesianism' (BigGK) but i think BigGK misses the importance of qualitative aspects of government expenditure. one of the reasons that Reagan-style Keynesianism didn't do more was because it ran up military spending and cut other kinds (social programs, infrastructure, etc.). military spending creates a multiplier but it is not as dynamic as other kinds of spending. other kinds of spending, like infrastructure, can increase productivity (number of studies showing this--Levy did some). spending on education also can affect productivity. other spending (health, other social services, etc.) will affect quality of life differently. also spending that gets moolah in the hands of those with higher propensities to consume (lower and middle income groups with more unsatisfied consumption demand for non-luxuries, not higher income groups with lower propensities and tendencies to spend on luxuries) will have more dynamic multiplier effects, even in the 'short run'
2. is it better to have the opportunity to work or to receive transfers? many studies show people would rather have the opportunity to work, at a decent job for decent pay (and benefits, etc.). so i would rather see people have the choice. government jobs don't have to be 'make work' at least theoretically. the way some of us envision a public service jobs program, 'work' would be very braodly defined, to include many of the activites that people would do if they had the opportunity to receive pay and could do 'whatever they want' (art, community gardens, education, training, social services, etc.). sure it's 'dreamy' but some of us haven't given up on dreaming, yet. see my http://www.cfeps.org/public/ForstaterWP22.htm on a vision of a govcernment jobs program that could be a vehicle for progressive social policies, including redefining what constitutes 'meaningful activity.' why should the market alone determine what constitutes 'valuable activity'?
3. someone asked about Gary Becker and whether he had put forward a model that was somewhat similar to 'dependency theory'? well, that would be going too far, but there is an interesting if ironic aspect of his initial 'economics of discrimination' that could be seen in this way, sort of. it was put forward in the late fifties, at the same time that members of radical Black Panther/Black Power groups were getting influenced by Third World revolutionary writings and starting to put forward a 'domestic colonialism' or 'internal colonialism' paradigm (see Robert Allen's Black Awakening in Capitalist America, e.g.). in Becker's model, there is the W group and the N group ('white' and 'Negro') and their economic relation is evaluated in terms of traditional neoclassical trade theory. the Ws are relatively capital-intensive and the Ns are relatively labor-intensive. Some of the Ws discriminate, but capitalists who discriminate lose profits in this model, and so the market should 'cleanse' the system in the long run through competition. so his model could not explain the persistence of discrimination. in standard neoclassical frameworks, you can't have both perfect competition (or Austrian competition) and discrimination in the long run. so you have to give up one or the other. some gave up perfect competition, and started putting forward models of statistical discrimination and other models of imperfect competition and discrimination. Becker himself could not give up perfect competition, so he moved to human capital theory, which explained racial wage differentials under perect compeitition by differences in productivity rather than discrimination. (in his original model, Ws and Ns were equally productive.) see the work of Darity, Rhonda Williams, Patrick Mason, etc.
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