Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country's ability to improve its standard of living over time depends a… - Paul Krugman

The fact is that Democrats have already been pursuing policies that are much better for the white working class than anything the other party has to offer. Yet this has brought no political reward.

In this part of the lecture I have argued that a number of works in development economics written during the 1950s contained, more or less explicitly and more or less self-consciously, a theory in which strategic complementarity played a key role in development: external economies arose from a circular relationship in which the decision to invest in large-scale production depended on the size of the market, and the size of the market depended on the decision to invest. Whatever the practical relevance of this theory, it made perfectly good logical sense. Yet this was subsequently abandoned, to such an extent that classic papers in the field began to seem, as the physicist Wolfgang Pauli used to say, "not even wrong" — simply incomprehensible.

Economists, like everyone, have their political es, but these are by no means as strong an influence on what they are willing to consider as you might think. For example, one might have thought that strongly liberal economists like, say, James Tobin would be at least mildly sympathetic to the views of radical economists who draw their inspiration from Marx, or of heterodox economic thinkers like Galbraith. After all, in such fields as history and sociology the Marxist or post-Marxist left has long received a respectful hearing. And yet you don't find this happening: liberal economists are almost as quick as their conservative colleagues to condemn heterodox leftist ideas as foolish—it was the liberal Robert Solow, not Milton Friedman, who defended orthodoxy in the bitter "capital controversy" with British radicals.