@thanatokephaloides @thanatokephaloides In other words, they don't really want you to pay attention to that arrow on the margins of the graph, nor of those two little names.

By contrast, you have Kees van der Pijl's Survey of Global Political Economy, which can find at least three schools of thought coming out of the Marx opus, corresponding to chapters 7, 8, and 9 of the book I linked: dialectical materialism, world-systems theory, and neoGramscianism.

#1.2 ..... points to the Marxists who came after him, some of which derived markedly different conclusions than Marx himself. (Upper leftmost corner of the chart.)

@Tony Wikrent I don't mean I support massive military spending so we can all have jobs, by the way. Just wanted to make sure that was clear!

#1.4
Just a simple look at the numbers convinced me that a large part of the reason World War Two got us out of depression was simply moving over 14 million people out of the labor force into the military. Voila! Unemployment problem solved.

The real interesting event, then, is what happens when the war ends, and 12 million people come back into the labor force (2 million having been left in the new, post-war military). The GI Bill is absolutely crucial to the economy adjusting to that military manpower demobilization and not snapping back into depression. Not only did the GI Bill send 9.2 million to college or work training, it also provided 4.3 million home loans, with a total face value of $33 billion ($292 b in 2016), 224,000 business loans of $609 million ($5.4 billion in 2016), and 69,000 farm loans of $270 million.

Largely because of the GI Bill, the percentage of Americans with bachelor and advanced degrees, rose from 4.6 percent in 1945 to 25 percent in 1995.

I agree with a few scholars that it was the GI Bill that created the American middle class after World War Two. Amazingly, very few economists pay any attention to these amazing numbers.

Now, as for "military keynesianism" as some call it. Government spending on the military is a waste. Just no getting around it. But, the big thing almost everyone misses is the massive effect of military research and development. Computers come entirely out of the WW2 effort to create machines to perform flight simulation, calculate ballistics and fire control; and perform calculations for modeling advanced physics for the Manhattan Project, and then, after the war, to create an air defense system against the Soviet Union. Not just computers, but software, too. Transistors come out of the Army Signal Corps lab work on miniaturizing electronics, which developed the "walkie talkie." This is the basis of the "Information Age" and it transformed the national and world economy, creating an immense amount of new wealth that was far greater than the waste of military spending.

The challenge we have is to find a way to continue the rich funding of new science and technology while beginning to steer it away from surveilling and killing people, to actual productive purposes from the get go. This is a political problem, and I frankly don't see it being solved until we stop coddling the rich and destroy them as a funding source for conservatism and libertarianism and their peculiar ideology of militarism.

@Tony Wikrent I totally agree that changing spending priorities is a political matter, not primarily an economic one. And of course, military spending nowadays does not produce jobs like it once did, even with the ridiculous amount of military we maintain. But then nothing it going to produce jobs like it once did, for many reasons, beginning with the fact that capital runs the show and sees no reason to pay a living wage to an American when they can pay 50c a day to a 10-year-old somewhere in the developing world. Of course there are many other reasons too, even including the ones the establishment loves to talk about because those reasons hide their dirty hands: automation and globalization (which they talk about like there's only one inevitable kind, not, of course, a policy choice they made).

By the way, of course you're spot on re: enlisting a bunch of unemployed people as soldiers. The thing is, I don't see how that's different than giving them a job and paying them and feeding and housing and training them while they do it--the only thing that seems different to me is that if you're offered the job, you can't turn it down (at least not back then, when there was a draft).

Drafting or enlisting soldiers IS government spending that creates jobs.

#1.4
Just a simple look at the numbers convinced me that a large part of the reason World War Two got us out of depression was simply moving over 14 million people out of the labor force into the military. Voila! Unemployment problem solved.

The real interesting event, then, is what happens when the war ends, and 12 million people come back into the labor force (2 million having been left in the new, post-war military). The GI Bill is absolutely crucial to the economy adjusting to that military manpower demobilization and not snapping back into depression. Not only did the GI Bill send 9.2 million to college or work training, it also provided 4.3 million home loans, with a total face value of $33 billion ($292 b in 2016), 224,000 business loans of $609 million ($5.4 billion in 2016), and 69,000 farm loans of $270 million.

Largely because of the GI Bill, the percentage of Americans with bachelor and advanced degrees, rose from 4.6 percent in 1945 to 25 percent in 1995.

I agree with a few scholars that it was the GI Bill that created the American middle class after World War Two. Amazingly, very few economists pay any attention to these amazing numbers.

Now, as for "military keynesianism" as some call it. Government spending on the military is a waste. Just no getting around it. But, the big thing almost everyone misses is the massive effect of military research and development. Computers come entirely out of the WW2 effort to create machines to perform flight simulation, calculate ballistics and fire control; and perform calculations for modeling advanced physics for the Manhattan Project, and then, after the war, to create an air defense system against the Soviet Union. Not just computers, but software, too. Transistors come out of the Army Signal Corps lab work on miniaturizing electronics, which developed the "walkie talkie." This is the basis of the "Information Age" and it transformed the national and world economy, creating an immense amount of new wealth that was far greater than the waste of military spending.

The challenge we have is to find a way to continue the rich funding of new science and technology while beginning to steer it away from surveilling and killing people, to actual productive purposes from the get go. This is a political problem, and I frankly don't see it being solved until we stop coddling the rich and destroy them as a funding source for conservatism and libertarianism and their peculiar ideology of militarism.

@Tony Wikrent Well, hail Hydra to that.

#3.2
Great point! But Milton had lots of help: von Hayek, von Mises, Murray Rothbard, the Volker Fund, the Koch brothers and their Kochtopus, etc., etc.

@Cassiodorus Thank you for that. It's like saying "anarchism."

You can clearly see which schools of thought have been neglected; it's the ones about which we make more generalizations, because we know less about them, because we've spent less time on them.

I know who Gramsci is, and read a little bit in grad school, but mostly I have no notion what you're talking about, and I have a reasonably good education.

#6.1 appears to pick portions of Marx without mention of their context, or of the various schools of Marxism. It's not surprising, though -- there is an awful lot to read, and if a simple chart is to be made, stuff has to be cut. A neoGramscian theory of wages would probably point more to a "war of position" than to population, for instance, and a world-systems theory of foreign trade would point to the underdevelopment thesis of Andre Gunder Frank and those who came after him.

@Tony Wikrent to bring lawsuits against privatization schemes because they (generally) do not fulfill the Constitutional mandate to promote the General Welfare?

Or maybe some lawyers have already tried this road....

#7.1
Along these lines, a hypothesis from Econospeak, The Hard Core of Neoclassical Economics, in November 2016:

Neoclassical economics has evolved to serve an ideological function which is promoted through incentives, the selection of new adepts, and a conceptual hegemony: the purpose of economics is to solve economic problems with minimum, and ideally no, recourse to politics. Thus welfare economics in particular plays a central role, since it is the basis for proposing economic solutions that don’t depend on a political deliberation or selection process.

Removing political considerations, of course, makes it impossible to fulfill the Constitutional mandate to promote the General Welfare.

Then, note the first comment:

I usually understand "neoclassical economics" to designate the heritage of the Marginal Revolution of the 19th century and Samuelson's Euclidean system as laid out first in his Foundations and later, his series of college textbooks. The core of that approach is not the content of its assumptions, but the methodological commitment to relying on analysis to the exclusion of synthesis. The whole point is the schizophrenia of, say, a macroeconomics preoccupied by an esoterica without actual money or a growth theory fixated on the magical properties of "technology".

Whereas I contend, the promotion of science and the development of technology, and the diffusion of the resulting knowledge, are the most important economic activities any society undertakes.