The History of Abba Lerner’s Supply-Side Inflation
Author(s)
Turgeon, Lynn
Abstract
An account of Lerner, who was perhaps the first Keynesian economist to stress the possibility and importance of inflation in the Keynesian model. Recall that in his theory of functional finance, Lerner made controlling inflation (and deflation) a central objective of public policy – and later formulated some rather innovative ways by which a government could do so. Perhaps more significantly, Lerner had hit on the notion of the unemployment-inflation trade-off of the Phillips Curve and the possibility of stagflation long before these were taken up by the rest of the profession in the 1960s and 1970s.
