The Stockholm School

Abstract

The economists of the so-called ‘Stockholm School’ share some of the conditions already noted for Kalecki, namely an education within a cultural tradition less hostile to the new ideas, both as regards theory and economic policy, which made it easier for them to grasp these ideas but at the same time hampered the full appreciation of their novelty compared to the state of economics of the time.¹ The need to distinguish between aggregate demand and national income, the autonomy of investments from savings, the conviction that full employment does not represent a normal state for the economy nor a condition toward which it tends: all these aspects were currently accepted by the exponents of this ‘circus’ and claimed to be explainable within a frame of ideas which was considered the natural extension of Wicksell’s scheme.