On Tue, 2 Mar 2004 09:38:44 +0800 kjkhoo at softhome.net writes:
> At 3:07 pm -0800 1/3/04, joanna bujes wrote:
> >
> >No kidding. Why are the antics of a time-serving opportunist
> >deserving of so much bandwidth? Perplexed and slightly disgusted.
>
> Indeed. Some of you must have known Paul Sweezy personally. Rather
> than this deluge of stuff, perhaps an obit that helps acquaint
> people
> with Sweezy's life and work, nothing hagiographic, just an honest
> appreciation of the man and his work, would do much, much more than
> the blasting of bdl. The damage that bdl intended has been done --
> all the googlers in the world are going to alight on his hatchet job
>
> (I'm surprised he didn't pick on something more recent such as
> Sweezy's views on maoist China!). Give them something else to google
>
> on...
Well, several years ago, I posted the following to this list:
I would suggest that there is now a days a lack of appreciation of Sweezy's stature as an economist even among Marxists. People might want to follow up their reading of Foster's tribute to Sweezy in the September issue of Monthly Review by reading Foster's article on Sweezy in *The New Palgrave: Marxian Economics* eds. John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman. As a young economist Sweezy made important technical contributions to the field of a sort whose importance were recognized by mainstream as well as Marxist economists. Much of his earlier research was concerned with the theory of imperfect competition and the issue of secular stagnation. Sweezy made a major contribution to the theory of imperfect competition with his 1939 paper, "Demand Under Conditions of Oligopoly" in which he presented the kinked demand curve analysis of oligopolistic pricing, and which stands as one of the classic essays in price theory.
Sweezy was one of the early backers of Keynesian economics
(alongside Paul Samuelson and JK Galbraith) and he was
one of the authors of *An Economic Program for American
Democracy* which provided a Keynesian rationale for
increased public expenditures during the New Deal era.
Sweezy, like Harry Magdoff, worked in a variety of New Deal
agencies including the NRC (National Resources Committee)
where he did research on the concentration of economic power.
>From this research, he wrote a study "Interest Groups in the
American Economy," which was published as an appendix
to the NRC's 1939 report, *The Structure of the American Economy*.
Sweezy established his credentials as a leading Marxist
economist with his 1942 book, *The Theory of Capitalist Development*.
Jim F.
>
> kj khoo
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>
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