Secular Stagnation: Keynesianism and the Demographic Theory of Crisis

Abstract

Post-GFC, the idea that we have entered a period of secular stagnation has been embraced even by the most mainstream economists. The thesis marks a return to once popular demographic theories of crisis which saw plummeting birth rates as the real driving force behind the Great Depression. In this paper, I consider the fact that even Keynes entertained two contradictory theories of deflation—one demographic and the other distributional—and that both were at work in the construction of the post-war welfare state. I argue that demographic catastrophism plays a recurrent if disavowed role in Keynesian responses to crisis, providing a useful rationale for why the demands of women and racial minorities must defer to the imperatives of national reproduction. But the demographic argument has also been deployed in Marxist feminist pleas on behalf of the welfare state, to ambivalent effect.