{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","uuid":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","normalized_title":"zombiecapitalismglobalcrisisandtherelevanceofmarx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","isbns":["9781608461042"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":426,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Zombie%20Capitalism%20Global%20Crisis%20and%20the%20Relevance%20of%20Marx","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/search"},"page":{"printed_page":145,"pdf_page":145,"physical_index":145,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ffb65c8c9671d0792cc9ceddda5e7a7a5cddf018b75129115b6b2cf4bc43cbfa"},"chapter":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","content":"English economist Arthur Cecil Pigou. Workers, according to his argument, had priced themselves out of their jobs by not accepting cuts in their money wages. Had they done so, the magic of supply and demand would have solved all the problems. Irving Fisher belatedly put forward a monetarist interpretation, arguing that the money supply was too low, leading to falling prices and so cumulatively increasing debt levels. More recent monetarist theorists put the blame on the behaviour of the central bankers. If only, the argument went, the US Federal Reserve Bank had acted to stop the money supply contracting in 1930 and 1931, then everything would have been all right-the arch monetarist of the post-war decades, Milton Friedman, traced its mistakes and the depth of the slump back to the death of New York Reserve Bank president Benjamin Strong in October 1928.7 By contrast Friedrich von Hayek and the \"Austrian\" school argued that excessive credit in the 1920s had led to \"an imbalance in the structure of production\" ,8 which would be made worse by increasing the money supply. Still other economists blamed the dislocation of the world economy in the aftermath of the First World War, while John Maynard Keynes stressed an excess of saving over investment that led to a lack of \"effective demand\" for the economy's output. Finally, there was the claim, still perpetuated in much media commentary today, that the raising of US tariffs by the Smoot-Hawley Act in the summer of 1930 unleashed a wave of protectionism preventing a recovery that would otherwise have occurred if free trade had been allowed untrammelled sway.\n\nEver since then the proponents of each view have found it easy to tear holes in the arguments of those holding the other views, with none being able to survive serious criticism. That is why the current Federal Reserve head, Ben Bernanke, sees explaining the slump as the ever illusive Holy Grail of his profession. Yet if the slump of the 1930s cannot be understood, neither can the chances of it recurring in the 21st century be seriously assessed.\n\nDisentangling the real causes of the slump from this mishmash of contradictory argument involves, first of all, looking at what really happened during the 1920s.\n\nRapid economic growth and the proliferation of new consumer goods had encouraged people to see this as a decade of continual rises in living standards and enormous productive investment-a story that is still frequently accepted today. But in fact wages rose by a total of only 6.1 percent between 1922 and 19299 (with no increase after 1925) and the manufacturing workforce remained static while industrial production expanded by about a third. Michael Bernstein notes that \"the lower 93 percent of the nonfarm population saw their per capita disposable income fall during the boom of the late 1 920s\".10 The fall in labour's share of total income meant that the proportion of national output that could be bought with wages fell. The economy could only keep expanding because something else filled the resulting gap in demand.\n\nThe Great Slump\n\n145","previous_page":144,"next_page":146}