YouSaid · the spoken record

Jan Toporowski

lines on the record: 21
first: 2023-02-10
most recent: 2023-02-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“In this way, it's too easy to dismiss his ideas as being characteristic of the long period between 1929 and let's say the 1970s when really the stock market and finance were not terribly important and were in effect dependent on state support. I think that the situation now is rather different and really needs Needs more working on. So I think this would be kind of my regret and my criticism, plus the fact that I think his He was an engineer and a feature of the type of economics of his time was that you had to won success in the profession by putting forward a neat mathematical model. Now, he knew that this wasn't enough. You had to have some kind of roots in the way in which the system operated, but he tended to believe that once he'd put forward the equation, then that was enough. And I don't think it was.”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think actually he well, I think his political judgment sometimes went askew. I mean, if I can give a particular example. From the United States, he thought that the student movement against the Vietnam War was headed for failure. And I think this was a misjudgment. He thought that American capitalism would be divided between the international capitalism. American multinationals would be much more sensitive to the way in which America is perceived abroad. And domestic American businesses that only operate in within the United States who may be much more bullish. I'm not sure that this is a distinction that works quite well in the United States. I think I wished he, I regret that he didn't write more about money and finance because I think he”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, when you use the word greed because it seems to me a kind of moralizing the fact that it's business practice to get the best possible price for your output, I think there is a sense in which if you have excess capacity the Excess capacity may under certain circumstances Course a business to not to raise prices, to moderate greed. But on the whole, I think business decisions are not made on a kind of moral issue. You try to get the best out of the market. It's the nature of the system.”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“debt by raising prices and I think doing it they were doing it quite successfully but that then feeds into a narrative that the that all this is the consequence of full employment and therefore you know must be must show that the state of full employment is financially unsound. It isn't of course because the inflation has very little to do with what's happening in the labour market. Wage increases have lagged price increases, unions and workers in general have a much Much weaker position in the labour market to some degree actually individual workers are benefiting from labour shortages but in terms of organisation, in terms of power in what politically called the power in the factories, workers still remain weak because worker organizations are weak.”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies, particularly corporations, into a difficult bind and a lot of them got out of this by borrowing at record low rates of interest and then seeking to recover that borrowing by raising their prices. My explanation of the inflation is would be twofold. One is that you have this energy costs, which is a temporary phenomenon. But the other one is really the Richard Kuh referred to as a type of balance sheet effect where firms are trying to clear off.”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it has vindicated a lot of his ideas because it's actually weakened the power of many businesses, particularly businesses in activities, retail, hospitality, these kinds of activities which transport even, which just saw their markets shrinking quite drastically. What then happened, however, was that the speed of the recovery as Lockdown was removed. I think a lot of those businesses took advantage of that situation to start raising their prices. And my view is that they were raising their prices because many of them had got seriously into debt. Many of them had found their political position weakened. They'd had to go knocking at the door of governments asking for loans, asking for tax rebates, various other public subsidies. Governments had responded by insisting on no layoffs, this kind of thing put”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kaletsky put it in a argued that it's purely political. He said that he argued in his famous article, Political Aspects of Full Employment, which I would recommend to anyone who doesn't know much Kaletsky. It's very, very easy to read not a single equation. Good. He argued there that, you know, there's no doubt that full employment is more rational for the system as a whole. It's more rational. Profits are higher, employment is higher, everything is better if you have full employment. However, full employment strikes at the heart of another feature of capitalism, which is the question of labour discipline. If you have a state of full employment, then it becomes difficult to discipline workers in the factory or in the office if a worker can leave his or her place.”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Additional public goods and public services which would be provided free so this gets around the problem of raising wages. You can increase real wages by providing free public goods. And then of course the other way is to redistribute income from higher incomes to lower incomes again by various transfer payments.”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“shouldn't be to maintain full employment. There are other instruments for doing this. The purpose of investment should be to provide the capacity for the amount of consumption that is required in the economy. That's how a rational economy would operate. So this again was a small difference between Keynes and Kalitsky. Keynes wanted investment to be the leader. Kalitsky argued that in fact you can create the equivalent of an investment boom through fiscal stimulus. It has the same effect of expanding profits and particularly using the fiscal stimulus to provide”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Kalitsky thought that managing the economy by trying to influence the level of investment is really a fool's game because you, for example, you may lower the rate of interest or lower the rate of taxation, give additional tax allowances. then you find that okay business takes up a certain amount of investment does some investment and then requires further tax cuts further cuts in the rate of interest in order to invest further and it really doesn't make sense it doesn't make it didn't make sense for Kalitsky because the purpose of investment”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Build a third row. Exactly. You've read the article. It's a lovely parable. And then, and of course, the first two railway lines will be busy ferrying all the workers and the steel required to for building the third railway line. Then, of course, you've now got three railway lines. At the end of this, you now have three railway lines. What do you do then? So he said, well, the answer is you build a fourth railway line. Businesses invest a lot, they will make a lot in profits. If they don't invest so much, then it has this problem of excess capacity discouraging economic activity, discouraging investment.”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're so customers at the door, then the restaurant owner will invest in more tables, more expand its premises. And he then explained it, interestingly enough, in the form of a very nice parable. He said, in the United States there are cities which are joined by more than one railway line and the effect of if you have, if they're both operating at less than full capacity, the effects of competition between them will be that eventually one of those railway lines will go out of business and you'll end up in a situation with much less capacity and actually Much less employment, much less output. So what is the answer to this problem of underutilization of capacity?”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and temperament, in fact, the way in which corporations are constructed, the hierarchical, bureaucratic way in which business corporations are constructed is really in order to eliminate the effect of passions and biases on issues like investment. In the end, what Kletsky thought was really most important was the issue of capacity utilization. Businesses will invest if they've got customers that cannot be satisfied from existing production. Even at full capacity, and what they will then do is, let's say, if the restaurant is full,”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“are not measurable in the same way that for example steel production is measurable it's really pushing the solution onto what cannot be seen and cannot be observed and Kaletsky's background was as an engineer and he found this deeply unsatisfactory, tried to resolve it certainly he thought that the rate of interest didn't have much impact. A businessman he thought were on the whole much more cynical much more hard bitten than to be influenced by let's say ephemeral moods”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“what causes that level of investment to be unstable much much more unstable than for example consumption and this was an answer that in many respects tormented Kalecki throughout his life he would put forward various models and then reflect on them and decide that no they were wrong Kane's sort of tried to cover up this problem by saying it's all due to animal spirits it's all due to uncertainty the problem with this is that you know uncertainty and an animal spirit”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me start off with what he agreed with Kane's on and he agreed with Keynes that capitalism is fundamentally a system that in which the level of output, the overall level of output and the overall level of employment is determined by the level of investment, the level of business investment. Now, obviously in the post-war post-Second World War economy, the government also has government spending also has a lot to do with it. But fundamentally the private sector, the level of activity in the private sector is really determined by the level of investment.”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The general equilibrium approach is essentially a static approach. It tells you what situation will arise where there will be no further change. And this actually doesn't happen in the real world. What you have in the real world is a constant state of flux. And this is why Kalitsky's approach to economics focusing on a business cycle, I think is really much more satisfying than the approach, for example, of Keynes in the general theory, which was essentially a static approach. To a problem that is fundamentally dynamic”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A Polish name, Kaletsky, and I thought, oh, I wonder what he has to say about this. I didn't realize that there were any distinguished Polish economists, so I started reading the book and it was his early essays on the business side. And suddenly it all made sense. And it's continued to make sense since then, albeit I think I take a rather different view to many followers of Micha ⁇ Kaletsky in the sense that I have this background in banking. Finance.”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the University of London for an MSc in economics. And I was actually greatly disappointed because all my professors would stand up and say, look, we have this general equilibrium model of the economy, my senior professor there, a very distinguished American-British economist. I remember standing in class and saying, look, the economy out there, it's in equilibrium. We know it's in equilibrium. You know, the models say so. And I remember sitting there thinking, I don't know what world this man lives in, you know, what he was saying, you know, had no bearing, showed no understanding of what was really going on. I remember going down to the library and flicking through some books and coming across.”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too young to remember what happened around 1974, but there was an oil price shock which in England was rapidly followed by a collapse in the real estate market, a collapse in the stock market, a couple of brokers brokerage houses went bust. Banks started some of the fringe banks went bust, a major bank tottered. The Bank of England had to call in the senior city of London figures to try and shore up the position. And for me, as a new... Come at all of this. I thought this was tremendously exciting. But and I thought, well, I need to find out more about it. I need to study economics. I registered at Birkbeck College.”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I came into this kind of work, I actually came across Kalecki when I first came to study economics. Now, at the time when I actually didn't do my undergraduate studies in economics, it was more in sociology and political science. And the first job that I got was in fund management for the Church of England for an institution called the August Institution or the Church Commissioners for England. And because I had done one course in introductory economics, they thought, oh, well, he knows something about it. And they put me into this change investments department. Now this was in 1974. You're obviously...”
2023-02-10 · Odd Lots · Jan Toporowski Explains Why Capitalists Dislike Full Employment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source