The Kaleckian Analysis and the New Millennium

Visiting Scholar Malcolm Sawyer, of the University of Leeds, commemorates Michal Kalecki’s 100th birthday by
considering how Kalecki’s macroeconomic analysis of developed capitalist economies should be adapted in
light of the institutional changes that have occurred since he did his major work. Sawyer believes that although
Kalecki’s reputation rests on his theoretical work, his theorizing was firmly based on his perceptions of the
institutional, political, and social realities of the economies he sought to analyze. According to Sawyer, Kalecki’s work is best
viewed as a mixture of “high-brow a-institutional” theory and “low-brow” institution-specific applied theory.
Because it is “virtually inevitable that the analysis of any . . . ‘middle-brow’ theorist will be rendered to some
degree obsolete by the passage of time,” Sawyer sets out to evaluate to what extent Kalecki’s theories are still
relevant and how they might be adapted for the new millennium.