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The Political Economy of Growth and Distribution: Economics, Public Policy and Politics

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Abstract

In 1965, Walter Heller, then chairman of President Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisors, presented the Godkin Lectures at Harvard University. Later published as New Dimensions of Political Economy (1966), Heller said that the United States had entered ‘the age of the economist’. The consolidation of modern macroeconomic theory had been accepted by political leaders, who could use the theory to guide and develop policies leading the United States to new heights of prosperity and social justice.

[E]vidence of a deep structural challenge can be discerned within the system, but the challenge is more feared and misunderstood than accepted and welcomed, and has progressed only far enough to reveal the limitations of the older structure, not far enough to force a solution for its problems. (Robert Heilbroner (1985), in The Nature and Logic of Capitalism)

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© 1993 Ron Blackwell, Jaspal Chatha and Edward J. Nell

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McGahey, R. (1993). The Political Economy of Growth and Distribution: Economics, Public Policy and Politics. In: Blackwell, R., Chatha, J., Nell, E.J. (eds) Economics as Worldly Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22572-9_7

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