查看文章

The most striking difference between the Great Depression of the 1930s and whatever you want call it in the 1970s is that then growing unemployment was accompanied by falling prices, while now we suffer from the unprecedented combination of misfortunes called stagflation. The great slump was accompanied, indeed partly caused, by the sharp fall in the prices of raw materials, including foodstuffs. The formation of the prices of goods and services by supply and demand is the central topic of so-called microeconomics, which occupies a major part in elementary teaching and proliferates into levels that are by no means elementary. Yet micro-economics has been cut off from any connection with the world that we are living in by eliminating the passage of time and postulating perfect competition. In a modern industrial economy, there is almost no production for self-consumption except housework within the home …