Spending Power and Lending Power

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

Tyler Cowen introduces his Austro-Chinese business cycle theory:

China uses American spending power to enlarge its private sector, while America uses Chinese lending power to expand its public sector.

Tyler comments on his own piece:

The piece cites Malthus in the same breath as Hayek. Malthus is a much-underappreciated economist and in macroeconomics he was much better than the naive overproduction theorists. His cyclical story is ultimately about proportionality and it is based on a “tragedy of the commons” effect — for the production of capital goods — which is not so different than his population mechanism. Malthus, by the way, had quite a modern understanding of supply and demand, well before the marginalist revolution.

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