As mentioned in my previous posts, I am writing a series of blog posts on the study of business cycles. In this particular blog post, I will illustrate what I will be writing in the series and what to expect from each of the blog posts.
For those not familiar with the study of business cycles, they are downward and upward movement in the aggregate activity levels of Gross Domestic Product, Gross National Income or anything that measures levels of economic wealth. The movements and changes in momentum are often characterized as economic booms or expansions and economic recessions (sometimes depressions). There are many nicknames that could potentially characterize business cycles with the most common one: the boom-bust cycle (The boom being the economic expansion and the bust being the economic recession.) A good, but rather drastic example of a business cycle would be the massive economic boom after the First World War during the Harding and Coolidge administrations and then the massive Great Depression that followed it. There have been many comparable theories explored, argued and disseminated within the study of business cycles and it will be hard to summarize the entire field in just several blog posts. In these series of blog posts, I will mostly discuss certain academic, both mainstream neoclassical and heterodox or non-mainstream approaches to interpreting them. Through the course of the next couple of months, I will be discussing these as listed in this table of contents blog post:
1. Thoughts on the Austrian Business Cycle Theory - In this blog post, I will mostly talk about Mises, Hayek and thoughts by certain mainstream economists. Here's a decent video explanation of the Austrian Business Cycle by Thomas E. Woods, a proponent of the Austrian School of Economics and fellow at the Mises Institute. This is a heterodox approach, but is one of the few heterodox approaches that I used to find extremely compelling as a college undergraduate.
2. Real Business Cycle Theory, Part 1 and Part 2 - In this blog post, I will be exploring the controversial, but interesting Real Business Cycle Theory that was first theorized by Edward C. Prescott. It is generally affiliated with the Chicago School of Economics and the New Classical macro-economists, with it being at the far-right spectrum of mainstream economics. I have found this the basic, introductory explanation of the Real Business Cycle Theory by Tyler Cowen, a writer on the Marginal Revolution website and a professor at the George Mason University.
3. Game Theory, Macroeconomics and Business Cycles - In this blog post, I will be exploring one of the many more detailed thought-bubbles I've had throughout the year. I will be looking at various approaches covered over the next couple of months and trying to synthesize something out of nothing.
4. Milton Friedman, Monetarism and Money Matters - In this blog post, I will be exploring one of the most popular approaches to interpreting the Business Cycle. While I consider the late Professor Friedman to be one of the economists that I have studied the most, I have serious contentious thoughts concerning monetarism and here, I will give several examples that proves him wrong otherwise.
5. New Keynesian Approaches to the Business Cycle - In this blog post, I will be exploring the more recent changes on the old Keynesian approaches in this left-leaning approach to business cycle theory.
6. Thoughts on Fischer Black's Business Cycles and Equilibrium - In this blog post, I will dissect a very interesting book on Fischer Black's thoughts on the causes of business cycles and market equilibrium. I will point out both strong points and weak points of his book in this rather long but concise post.
6. Post-Keynesian and Post-Marxian Approaches - In this blog post, I will be discussing the most popular left-leaning heterodox approaches to the study. Here I will explore the famous adherents to this non-mainstreamschool of economics, including Michael Kalecki, Joan Robinson, John Roemer and Steven Keen. I will also provide excerpts about some current work that I have been reading lately.
7. Other Schools, Questions on Heterodoxy, Final Thoughts on Business Cycles - Here I will be accessing the other macroeconomic approaches, but I will also give some thoughts and questions on the nature of heterodoxy in interpreting challenges to economics and some final thoughts on business cycles.
I will be posting these posts sporadically as soon as I finish completing them. Some of them will be extremely informative and in depth, so keep an eye on my posts as they are completed. I will also be posting several unrelated blog posts throughout the next month, but I will try to tag business cycle series onto the related blog posts.
Edit: I have also included in this series a rebuttal of some of the key points that are detailed in Fischer Black's book, Business Cycles and Equilibrium. Even though the book is relatively dated, the late Fischer Black's ideas still have strong resonance in the eyes of many economists/financial economists. I just wanted to dissect his particular approach described in his book as an exercise in analyzing peoples' arguments and breaking them down. I also found that his book was an extremely read
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