1. Josef Steindl 1912-1993
In 1952 the Austrian economist Josef Steindl published his best-known book, "Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism" (hereafter M&S). Steindl argued that the displacement of free competition by oligopoly, which had occurred in many branches of American manufacturing industry beginning in the 1890s, had increased profit margins and reduced the degree of capacity utilisation in the industries concerned. High and increasing levels of excess capacity had discouraged investment spending, reducing the rate of growth of effective demand and further reducing the level of capacity utilisation. The consequence was a lower rate of economic growth in the United States, which indicated a strong tendency towards stagnation. Steindl’s argument had affinities with some elements of Marxism, and also with the Kaleckian variant of what would soon become known as Post Keynesian economics, but it seemed to have little relevance to the boom years of the 1950s.1 Two decades later, M&S attracted renewed critical attention in the depressed 1970s, and more recently been it has been cited approvingly by some radical macroeconomists in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007/08.