Inside the Institution of Growthmanship: Reprising the Stagnation Hypothesis

James M. Cypher

Journal of Economic Issues, 2016, vol. 50, issue 2, 415-423

Abstract: Growthmanship — the once institutionalized legacy of the Keynesian revolution in the US — holds that rapid, sustained growth in GDP should be (and can be) the uppermost macroeconomic policy objective. Postulating the automaticity of market forces, the Chicago school’s ascendency in the early 1970s effectively marginalized growthmanship, while eliding stagnation and refocusing economics on vacuous, equilibrium-driven models. As a result, growthmanship was superseded by the institutionalization of wage stagnation as a macroeconomic policy objective. An institutionalist analysis of stagnation posits conditional and contingent conjunctures and denies the determinism underlying the conceptualization of permanent tendencies. I hypothesize the emergence of a social structure of redistribution based on the institutionalization of wage stagnation. Wage stagnation is a condition arising from the pursuit of neoliberal macroeconomic policies that are antithetical to full employment and wage growth.

Date: 2016
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DOI: 10.1080/00213624.2016.1176494

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