economics - where to begin?

xp

I have no formal economics training, but from my perspective the question could be recast in terms of whether GDP ought to be considered as an abstract measure of productive activity, in which case housework, vegetable gardening etc. are certainly productive activities and ought to be included, or alternately if GDP should be a measure of activity producing revenue or wages, and therefore more reflective of the 'money economy' only. In the second case, GDP might be more useful to planners, investors and statisticians whose main concern is the money economy, but less reflective of the whole productive activity within a society or a nation.

In short, it would depend on who is using GDP numbers and for what purpose.

Because GDP is just a measurement of whatever we want to include in it, there's no right answer apart from its fitness for the uses we put it to. Inevitably, GDP has entered the realm of politics, and so it is made to bolster arguments for which it is ill-suited. But if it is reformed to better fit some uses, it will perform other uses more poorly. As someone once said, "You pays your money and you makes your choice."

Yes, i roughly agree i think, though 'money only' is probably a bit tight, as this is after a definition of product, that which is produced, rather than credits and debits. so on that basis i think you would want to see charity sector and voluntary work included in it, for instance. nevertheless, there is something that i'm struggling to shake about it in some way representing the output resources (whether goods or services) that are available for use, and in some way represent the capabilities of an economy.

For instance the reason that current methodology around the financial sector is so damning is because it severely overestimates the importance to an economy of that sector. With GDP being one of the main tools used to judge the success of a country, and improved productivity being such a constant goal, that miscalculation means that politicians badly overrate the productive, social and political importance of the financial sector. I think most of us here would feel that anyway, but the important point is that in this case it is on their own terms.

But the desire to improve the proportion of outputs to effort put in doesn't seem to be necessarily a bad one, and i'm struggling slightly to see how 'household production' fits into that.

That said, increasing the importance of household production to the level of financial services currently may see huge improvements in childcare as well as more money in domestic care etc.

the idea is that gdp only counts market transactions, and you can't sell your home production to yourself. i'm sure Diane Coyle talks about this (i've been meaning to read that book) but, you know, gdp would increase by nearly 30% if everyone worked saturday and sunday, but obviously we'd all be far worse off. it's quite important (and good econ profs will stress) that gdp is not a welfare measure

imo rather than enlarge the definition of gdp or fuss about redefining it we should just learn to focus less on it, and any single index for that matter. you see a similar thing in inequality where people become too focused on one measure (the gini coefficient in an earlier literature, things like 1% share or 90-10 ratio now) and miss some subtler trends that make up the big picture

as far as the financial sector goes, its social benefit should be measured by how it benefits our ability to insure ourselves against risk, save and borrow at reasonable cost, and allocate capital efficiently, not by how big a share of gdp it occupies. and the amount of resources poured into finance have to do with the returns to it, not with its proportion of *Measured* GDP. what matters is the counterfactual. a good article on this: Luigi Zingales' Does Finance Benefit Society

also may not be news to you after the Coyle but i v much enjoyed the chapter in Ed Leamer's 'Macroeconomics: Stories and Patterns' on income accounting

I guess I should read the book but I'm not sure why the contribution of financial services to GDP are harder to measure than any other services, such as education, medical care, entertainment etc. I don't think GDP is intended to be a measure of social value. If people want to spend their money gambling in Las Vegas or playing the stock market, then they're paying for a service, and they're valuing that service by how much they're willing to spend.

all v useful, flopson, thanks:

the idea is that gdp only counts market transactions, and you can't sell your home production to yourself. i'm sure Diane Coyle talks about this (i've been meaning to read that book) but, you know, gdp would increase by nearly 30% if everyone worked saturday and sunday, but obviously we'd all be far worse off. it's quite important (and good econ profs will stress) that gdp is not a welfare measure

Coyle persistently reminds the reader of this throughout the book. If only governments understood this in terms of policy and pronouncements.

imo rather than enlarge the definition of gdp or fuss about redefining it we should just learn to focus less on it, and any single index for that matter. you see a similar thing in inequality where people become too focused on one measure (the gini coefficient in an earlier literature, things like 1% share or 90-10 ratio now) and miss some subtler trends that make up the big picture

this was very much what I came out feeling. it's incredibly useful to have this statistic, but (as above) focusing on it to the exclusion of a wider dashboard of measures is wrong (see this nice OECD layout here).

o. nate, I'm extremely wary of attempting to explain or re-present anything here, because I don't actually properly understand it, so I'll just quote from the book on measuring financial services:

Most services charge customers a fee, and the fee revenues give statisticians the handle they need to measure output. Relatively few financial services involve direct fees or commissions. For the most part, banks do not generally sell services for a fee. A large proportion of their profits comes instead from the gap between the interest rates at which they can borrow (or pay depositors) and lend, or from trading activity. As the OECD GDP statistics manual puts it: "Measurement using the general formula [for constructing GDP] would result in their value added being very small, if not negative.." &c

There's then a long bit about how they're currently measured, and how the higher the risk, the greater the productivity score.

That's a good point about a lot of banks profits being made indirectly and not in the form of obvious fees. For example, market-makers make profits on the difference between the bid and offer price and not from an explicit commission. As I understand it, GDP can be measured in two ways: by income or by consumption. Measuring by consumption would be hard when the fees are not explicit, but it seems they would be relatively easier to capture using an income based approach, i.e. by simply measuring bank income. I guess a similar problem occurs in the case of legalized gambling. A casino doesn't make it's money on explicit fees - it makes it by offering a game with known odds. I guess there are still some complications, such as for instance separating out cases when banks are actually making money on appreciation of assets, which is strictly not part of GDP, but these seem at least somewhat surmountable in principle.

Not sure this is the best place to put some thoughts and questions about Maurizio Lazzarato's The Making of Indebted Man - some v generic observations in the reading thread after getting about a third of the way through (it's not long - more of an essay than a book). It's more philosophy than economics.

tl;dr version: the connexions between the specific mechanisms of psychology, economics, society and politics don't always map well onto the methods of philosophy, resulting in some stuff that i feel a bit sceptical about, but reassuringly the general conclusion that we're all definitely fucked isn't very much affected.

It's written after the 2008 financial crash. His argument seems to be that the financialization of the state and banking, and the high levels of personal debt - whether in housing or via consumer credit - have resulted in an existential change to western people. The first chapter examines the evidence for this, and the second looks to apply Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals and Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of the creditor-debtor relationship in Anti-Œdipus, which I haven't read.

That first section contains some shocking figures on the financialisation of local government and welfare in France, none of which I knew. UNEDIC collects an unemployment tax on wages and contributions from employers, which it then disburses to the unemployed, and precarious and seasonal workers. Mainly because of tax breaks to employer contributions as part of the government's 'jobs policy', and the explosion of gig economy precarious work, UNEDIC is structurally in the red. UNEDIC has raised money by issuing bonds on financial markets The consequence is that unemployment benefit has become a source of revenue for banks, financial institutions and pension funds. If one of those pernicious institutions like Moody's reduces its rating for the organisation, the borrowing rate rises and finance takes a larger draw on tax revenue, which decreases the availability of welfare funds.

In order to maintain good ratings, unions and employers must act in accordance with the demands of ratings agencies rather than with the unemployed.

Couple of questions: I don't believe in the UK we have the ability to issue bonds purely on the welfare funds, because it's not separate? In this case it would be the government issuing bonds (which of course only moves the issue up a level - the central problem doesn't go away, but is in this case less immediately focused on the welfare mechanism).
Also, that statement about acting in accordance with ratings agencies - it's not clear a) that the ratings agencies would pronounce on UNEDIC or France more generally, or b) what pressure they can actually bring to bear on the mechanisms of the welfare system (other than a pressure on general government brought about by needing to meet their expectations on financial behaviour.

I realise the difference is a matter of degree here, but it was difficult to be clear from his wording.

He then presents some eyewatering stats about local government in France. The departmental government of Seine-Saint-Denis had got loans from the financial markets linked to a highly volatile index, with the result.

"The initial rate, over three years, was 1.47%. It is now 24.20%, which comes to a jump of 1.5 million euros a year, nearly the cost of a daycare centre."

The debt of French administrative regions and departments has risen 50% since 2001.

Lazzarato makes it sound as if this is commonplace across Europe, but I really wasn't sure about the UK, and had a rummage around. As far as I can tell from this FT article in April (paywalled), it will surprise no one to know, the vast proportion of financial speculation carried out by local governments has been in property, especially shopping centres it seems.

Across the UK, local councils have been plunging into the commercial property market or embarking on residential property development, either for sale or for the private rental market.

“They are punting like drunken sailors all around the country,” says a bemused fund manager who has been outbid by local authorities on more than one investment this year.

The driving force behind this hedge fund-style activity is the same one that pushed local governments in Japan to buy property in the 1980s bubble and that now prompts China to encourage manic property development from its municipalities: the need to plug gaps in their budgets after years of funding cuts from the central government.

However at the bottom, I noticed this:

As well as requiring much less due diligence than a commercial bank, the PWLB [Public Works Loans Board] does not apply a loan-to-value discipline, whereby borrowings are capped at a given percentage of the purchase price. And it has plenty more largesse to distribute because its outstanding loans, which stood at £65.3bn in March 2016, are permitted under its current remit to rise to £95bn. The larger local authorities are also now turning to the capital markets where, as sovereign borrowers, they can issue index-linked debt on terms even more favourable than those available from the PWLB.

So, although it seems that UK local government is badly exposed to a potential property crash, it's currently less exposed on the financial markets, though has the capacity to do something about that, and is starting to do so.

He then goes on to combine personal debt with structural or societal debt with this sort to argue we are living in a society totally governed by debt. I found this a bit of a weakness, in that I think the psychological effects of consumer debt are different to the effects of structural debt. The sense of almost feudal bondage is surely less if you are part of a society that is indebted than if you have personal responsibility for the debt. His approach is philosophical though, and is therefore a question of category rather than extent, i guess. He writes about the idea of the debtor's guilty conscience for instance, but does a citizen living in a society shaped by the debt structures I wrote about above feel a guilty conscience to the same or any extent?

I also have some difficulty with the idea this is new. It was interesting to read in the book on double-entry bookkeeping how writing came out of counting, and how the symbols used for counting first made their way into wider culture via funerary rites and i believe it's certainly the case that in many societies the process of dying is also an accompting.

My recollection of notes on Othello and The Merchant of Venice is that credit was very much a part of mercantile shipping - necessarily so, given that much shipping was a gamble.

So it seems hard to say that the indebted person is purely a function of the modern finkncialised politics and consumerism. His book in fact constantly refers to a baseline 19thC industrial society, a time of those who owned capital, and of marxist production and labour, and consequent consumer fetishism. His stated belief, if I've understood him correctly is that in a credit-debit relationship, including existing in an indebted/financialised society what you are selling is effectively your good character, and your future decisions. Everything becomes about this 'moralism' of the power relationship put in place by debt.

After all, the "moral" judgment has to do with "life." And yet the "life" in question is not biological life (health, birth, and death), as with the concept of biopolitics, and still less cognitive life, but "existential" life. Existence here means the power of self-affirmation, the force of self-positioning, the choices that found and bear with them modes and styles of life. The content of money here is not labour but existence, individuality, and human morality...

Although I have been regularly wary of the argument in its detail there is a *lot* of otm in the book. This bit on the knowledge economy in particular was very good:

It seems to me that my friends in cognitive capitalism are mistaken when they make "knowledge" the origin of valorisation and exploitation. There is nothing new in the fact that science, skills, and technological and organisation innovations represent the productive forces of capital – Marx already understood as much in the mid-19th century. But the so-called knowledge economy fails to account for most of the class relations the theory of cognitive capitalism attributes to it. it is but one mechanism, one type of activity, one site of power relations alongside multiple other activities and power relations. Indeed, it must submit to the imperatives of the debt economy (savage cuts in "cognitive" investments, in culture, education, public services etc.)

..

In the current crisis, the "most" that capitalism demands and compels, in every area, is less knowledge than that one take upon oneself the costs and risk externalised by the State and corporations .. It is this "subjectivization," [his word for making someone a 'subject'] in addition to "labour" in the classical sense of the term, that – to speak like the economists of capital – makes productivity grow.

..

If capitalists spend little time worrying about investing in a more than improbable – always heralded but never realized – "knowledge society," they are, on the other hand, cruelly inflexible when forcing the governed to take on all the economic risks and damage the capitalists themselves have created.

So, yes, this book is currently contributing to my inner warfare about the great, exciting changes and turmoil brought about about by the mercantilist vector (culminating in the vast inhuman abstractions of financialised debt structures and neoliberalism), with l'uomo novo liberated from feudalism and social democracy the two ideals that go long with that, at least in some of its stages, and a more structurally radical approach - burn the fuckers down, basically.

ime philosophy ppl have no fucking clue when it comes to economics/finance

ime, vice versa

sorry Fizz your post is tl;dr so i just skimmed. book sounds like shit, and maybe vaguely David Graeber-ish? one common fallacy dudes like that use is confuse the reason something came to exist (historically) with the reason it continues to exist. i don't know if there is a latin name for that type of fallacy. like, Graeber would say that currency came about because early states wanted to levy taxes to fund wars, hence all currency is about WAR, not double-coincidence of wants or liquidity or even about exchange at all. but, that's obviously not true. if currency did not exist we would have to invent it

some non-crazy ppl actually do contemplate ending debt, this is a classic post by John Cochrane (ok he is maybe crazy in another way) on the radical proposal of getting banks to themselves fund on 100% equity: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.ca/2016/05/equity-financed-banking.html

(for some reason bonkers finance-curious philosophers don't seem to talk about equity, the natural alternative to debt)

some economists know a lot about philosophy of methodology, but a lot are kinda naive-Popperian-via-Friedman, unfortunately

what economics/finance should philosophy ppl know? asking for a friend

ime philosophy ppl have no fucking clue when it comes to economics/finance

for me a major problem with economics (from economic theory to the economist magazine) is an inability to sceptically analyse its inherent ideological assumptions

yeah this is the wedge they use to get you to read them, but in the limit they're just cranks. the solution is to read better economists (they exist, i promise), not to read neophytes claiming to be able to see through the ideology

i think the best contemporary left-friendly econ writer for u guys is Chris Dillow, blog is here http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/

some choice posts to earn your trust:

http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2015/03/economists-be-more-marxist.html
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2016/05/bad-arguments-against-marxism.html
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2016/10/the-case-for-basic-income.html

and here are some posts where he discusses ideology & mainstream economics

http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2017/04/on-mainstream-economics.html
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2017/01/on-defences-and-attacks-on-economics.html
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2016/11/ideology-in-economics.html

you also may like JW Mason, blog here http://jwmason.org/the-slack-wire/

the type economics i'm into is pretty intensely empirical rather than theoretical (altho the latter still plays a huge part by necessity) and takes quite seriously the difficulty of establishing cause and effect in the world, so things like methodology are first-order. imo most of what we think of as ideologies implicitly rest on a set of empirical assumptions about the world, and the first thing to do (even if you are a naked ideologue) is to investigate those to establish common knowledge (in an Aumann sense)

cheers flopson. been reading stumbling and mumbling for a while, but jw mason is new to me - will check out.

i think i’m reasonably empirically aware and orientated but even taking into account the analysis of people like stumbling and mumbling, flip chart fairytales, dan davies, yorkshire ranter, frances coppola etc, i like to see even irrational stuff or conceptually artificial stuff throw itself against the wider set of assumptions.

ya also tbh i'm burntout from reading the same old critiques being tossed around for 5 years

i like this guy a LOT (flopson's mmv):

1 like = 1 criticism of mainstream economics

— Unnerving Economics (@UnlearningEcon) October 17, 2017

dillow is also very good -- i want to like mason but i find him technically hard going

ah great, some new follows. felt i was glib in the posts above. good economic theory practice and analysis is good, not bad. and necessary with so much around that is mendacious or muddled. money is an important thing and important to get right or people will suffer. and my quarrel certainly isn't with the bloggers and writers we've been recommending and mentioning in the last few posts. but there are some writers, even writers who can occasion be good and interesting, whose writing and thought doesn't seem to comprehend or acknowledge, even tacitly, that there is a green hill without finance's walls, and that the wider structures of finance operate within ideology. I'm looking at you Tim Harford.

I had what I thought was a good example of this earlier this week, but have obviously forgotten it now.

noooo mark

Simon Wren-Lewis's blog and twitter feed https://mainlymacro.blogspot.co.uk/ are well worth reading, again fairly technical but not oppressively so.

For someone coming from a more philosophical background, I think Steve Randy Waldman's blog might be of interest. He sometimes steps back and unpacks the philosophical assumptions behind economic concepts in a way that's helpful for an outsider. He doesn't post as much any more, but if you start digging through his archives, you'll probably turn up something interesting. Here's a series of posts he did on welfare economics, as a taster:

http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5149.html

those are great posts but way tl;dr for the point he's making

Maybe not his most concise writing, but hey it's a blog. Here's one which I think is a bit pithier, on optimal taxation of capital:

http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/4218.html

Oh shit.

John "Most studies are false" Ioannidis comes for economics https://t.co/6RDqN5t2uH ht @UCBITSS pic.twitter.com/RUYweSYaTJ

— Lee Crawfurd (@leecrawfurd) October 25, 2017

with apologies to flopson - unlearning economics' 111 criticisms of economics here.

i don't understand quite a few of them. several hit the point i was cackhandledly trying to make upthread.

4. Embeds libertarianism, consumerism and capitalism into models without questioning them
5. Excessively 'thin' conception of the environment as amenable to cost-benefit analysis, no acknowledgement of how ecosystems work
12. No real concept of the social. Putting 'identity' in a utility function doesn't count
35. Crises are not exogenous shocks
88. The overarching idea that 'competition is good' ignores the many cases where it is negative (such as arms races)

and a few i hadn't thought of, but i thought were good:

53. In general, workplace dynamics are absent (except in terms of contract efficiency)
49. With the way it’s taught, people who learn it often cannot think any other way. It is difficult to do even if you want to
60. Subjective well-being research has yet to tell us anything we didn’t already know
84. Where are the activist economists? Global slavery, meat-eating, the environment, are all both huge economic and huge moral issues

My contrib rn is this article that Flopson sent me a while back, which I do like, on profit under Socialism.

No real concept of the social.

otmfm x 10

what's a good short book about the uh let's call it perfect-information ideal market transaction model

Try something from Stiglitz maybe?

Stiglitz is imperfect information, also i don't recommend any of his books (his papers from the 70s are excellent)

one interpretation of j.'s question is: the book you are looking for is Debreu - Theory of Value

iirc u are a former mathematician, so it will be legible to you. i've never read it but it's the kind of old theory book people say things like 'for 100 pages of differential topology it reads just like a novel' about

lol gotta love a book that starts out with 20 pages of definitions of 'set' and 'function', takes me back

i will take a look but i don't really need to know that much, just how economists talk about the concepts involved

found some ethicists deploying this model in a blase way and i, knowing zilch BUT being aware that work on imperfect information is PLENTY OLD by now, was like uhhhhh we're doing this why now?

bc of market failure?

no bc business ethicists are slaves to free market ideology

lmao oh yeah that

just how economists talk about the concepts involved

outside libertarians, the perfect markets things are benchmark models. economists add the imperfection they judge relevant in context. in mainstream macroeconomics a common departure is to assume credit markets are incomplete (so some people cannot insure themselves) or that labour markets have 'search frictions' (costly for firms to fill vacancies. pretty much all of economics is 'which departure from benchmark is the relevant one'. sometimes you invoke multiple imperfections but it can get 'intractable'

i recommend the book Economics Rules by Dani Rodrik

i don't think i saw this post at the time. this guy muted me on twitter (for a lighthearted and clever zing smh) so i'll reply here

4. Embeds libertarianism, consumerism and capitalism into models without questioning them

true to some extent. but it's not always clear how else to proceed. imo economists are wary of paternalism to an extreme degree, and i consider that a virtue. it would be extremely weird for an economist to propose a policy like 'stop consuming so much dross, sheeple', that seems outside our purview somehow. to the extent that that 'embeds libertarianism, consumerism and capitalism' i don't think it's a bad thing. the focus of economics is about collective choice (policy) not individual choice. another thing that's obvious but still worth mentioning, is that models embed capitalism because we are in capitalism and economists (try to) study the economy as it currently exists; in the 70s and 80s you could find papers about central planning in top american journals. so i think it's more of a demand than supply thing. (also, scandinavian countries are disproportionately studied relative to population or gdp--mostly because they have incredible data)

5. Excessively 'thin' conception of the environment as amenable to cost-benefit analysis, no acknowledgement of how ecosystems work

people do try to do this but it's insanely hard

12. No real concept of the social. Putting 'identity' in a utility function doesn't count

people do try to do this but it's insanely hard. economists tend to be hardasses and without good evidence

35. Crises are not exogenous shocks

i agree with this in a sense. but to some extent 'exogenous shock' is a tautology, like what's the distinction between 'shock' and 'initial condition'?

88. The overarching idea that 'competition is good' ignores the many cases where it is negative (such as arms races)

imo economics clarifies these rather than ignores them

53. In general, workplace dynamics are absent (except in terms of contract efficiency)

true this is a hole in the literature. hard to study

49. With the way it’s taught, people who learn it often cannot think any other way. It is difficult to do even if you want to

i'm not sure that there is 'another way' to think about it, tbh. like there are no 'untrained' economic geniuses, even brilliant finance bros often have horrible ideas about economics. i agree that thinking purely in terms of 'rigorous' models can be a straightjacket, and it's certainly important to be able to loosen up and think more informally for creative thinking. i think someone like Chris Dillow is a good example of someone who knows tonnes of economic theory but thinks very flexibly.

60. Subjective well-being research has yet to tell us anything we didn’t already know

this is wrong as stated. maybe it hasn't told us anything we didn't already guess. this kind of argument is really dumb

84. Where are the activist economists? Global slavery, meat-eating, the environment, are all both huge economic and huge moral issues

agree with this. culturally there is a norm against stridency that goes too far, into status quo bias

*economists tend to be hardasses and without good evidence or data research projects tend to die off

xps thx flopson, i'll take a look

not sure of the ultimate provenance - seems probable that it is due primarily to friedman and hayek, esp. 'pop' work? - but business ethics authors, the main people in my life who force me to learn anything about econ, seem to default to using a strongly libertarian construal of every economic concept they employ, not sure whether it's because they're not-so-closet libertarians themselves or because they're trying to make what they take to be good or bad faith gestures toward including business essentials in otherwise serious discussions of (ethical) value.

ya 'business ethicist' sound like some kind of unholy euphemism

murder doctor

i believe in a leftish interpretation of the Milton Friedman argument against Corporate Social Responsibility/Business Ethics

In a free economy there is one and only one social responsibility of business―to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits ... It is the responsibility of the rest of us to establish a framework of law such that an individual in pursuing his own interest is, to quote Adam Smith again, ‘led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.'

Friedman's interpretation was that the only framework of law necessary was a whiggish minimalist protection of property rights. my interpretation agrees that firms can fundamentally only be self-interested, and the only way to bend them away from destructive self-interest is through regulation (whether rules, pigouvian taxation, direct oversight, or active structuring of markets will depend case-by-case). any self-imposed business ethics or corporate social responsibility can only be a scam to divert attention from the actual crimes of self-interest, and to make the public think active regulation isn't necessary because of their benevolence

bakan-style

Flopson : what's good to read about secular stagnation now? Is there such a thing?

tx for these posts flopson, and for picking up that old post. as i’ve probably said upthread, still grappling in a non-expert way with these concepts, so yr even-handed and thoughtful responses are v useful.

Flopson : what's good to read about secular stagnation now? Is there such a thing?

xps jim- i think secstag is kind of over now that Larry Summers has given up on it since Trump got elected? imo there is a fun demand-side version of secstag, for me the most useful for thinking about that whole line of argument was to read about Japan (i recommend Richard Koo 'The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics - Lessons from Japan’s Great Recession' with the caveat that some people strongly disagree with Koo so after reading it seek out some critiques) then there's the boring supply-side version where technology is stagnant (or maybe we're not measuring it properly blahblahblah) and for that i would read the second half of Robert Gordon's long-ass book from a couple of years ago

so Growth as a standalone topic in mainstream macroeconomics is, as far as i can tell, kind of over? with Paul Romer endogenous growth theory being the last great hope that failed. afaict the current interesting growth stuff is split across macro-development, resurgence in economic history (read/follow @pseudoerasmus if interested in these 2), and micro innovation policy (which connects to macro growth through 'neo-Schumpeterian' models, most famous of which is Aghion-Howitt. i'm actually not entirely sure how active this area is, could still be a thing). i actually kind of think the retreat of growth is a good thing tbh, a lot of the classic growth papers are really dumb like throwing a bunch of countries into a data-set and regressing growth rate on covariates. a good recent example of the development-historical approach is an incredible paper on South Korea's big push (summary by the author here https://voxdev.org/topic/firms-trade/manufacturing-revolutions-role-industrial-policy-south-korea-s-industrialisation)

i'm not sure what post-growth means, but i do think it's extremely important to argue against degrowth nutsos. there's a fun recent series of blog posts by Branko Milanovic trolling degrowth ppl with some growth arithmetic beginning with this one: http://glineq.blogspot.ca/2017/11/the-illusion-of-degrowth-in-poor-and.html and one of my favourite more speculative essays is 'Economics in the Age of Abundance' by brad delong https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economic-problems-age-of-abundance-by-j--bradford-delong-2016-01?barrier=accessreg . i strongly dislike and avoid Paul Mason and that whole lot

Aghion

by the way this guy is extremely French and insanely funny manic gesticulating public speaker, some v worthwhile videos of his talks on youtube. he'll win nobel prize in ~10-15 years

FP for bakan

Double thumbs up for neo-schumpeterianism