Articles by Pulin B Nayak

A K Dasgupta spent his lifetime teaching and researching on the classical, marginalist and Keynesian theories of value and distribution associated with the writings of Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Marshall and Keynes. In the last part of his life he was much attracted to the writings of M K Gandhi as well as the notion of austerity contained in the writings of David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. The questions Gandhi had raised still continue to be astonishingly relevant. This article briefly explores this literature.

The Economic & Political Weekly has been able to successfully raise, elaborate and theorise on those aspects of economic and social reality that one finds around oneself. And it has been successful to a remarkable degree. Of course, one also comes across some academic economists who regard themselves as purists, and when it comes to EPW, have an attitude of disdain for the kind of writing it employs. This should be regarded as par for the course.

Keynesian Reflections: Effective Demand, Money, Finance and Policies in the Crisis edited by Toshiaki Hirai, Maria Cristina Marcuzzo and Perry Mehrling, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2013; pp xxiv + 317, Rs 850.

India: A Portrait by Patrick French (New Delhi: Penguin Books), 2011; pp xii+436, Rs 699.

It is instructive to see how the issue of business cycles was looked upon by John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter, each of whom wrote masterly tracts on the subject in the 1930s. Though Keynes was concerned with a short-run problem, Schumpeter was concerned with the long-run dynamics of the capitalist system. Given the present financial crisis, it is possible to argue that the true rationale of a stimulus package in countries such as India that are still low in terms of their average level of living ought to be to address fundamental, long-term, rather than short-term, issues.