Psychomachia: The Fight for Mansoul: Making Moral Sense of Neo-Republican Economics - Paperback

by Robert E. Kohn (Author)

This book, a polemical response to the dystopian direction that politics and economics have taken in the United States, is a combination of literary criticism and economic theory. It draws on the Latin poem Psychomachia by Prudentius, a citizen of the Roman Empire who lived through the last half of the fourth century into the beginning of the fifth, and on the 1959 groundbreaking graduate text on Public Finance by Richard Musgrave, which comes closest to infusing the present polemicist with the economic equivalent of what Prudentius called "Worship-of-the-Old-Gods." Kohn's "Old-Gods" are Allocative-Efficiency, Distributional-Equity, Inheritance-Taxation, Progressive-Tax-Rates, Paying-Down-the-Debt-When-the-Economy-Heats, Employment-Stabilization, and Optimal-Debt.

Author Biography

Robert E. Kohn, Professor Emeritus of Economics, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, changed his field of study to literary and art criticism after his retirement in 1990. His subsequent books in the new field include New Close Readings of The Crying of Lot 49, Radiance and Secrecy in Marilyn Robinson's Gilead, A Darwinian Reading of Bill Kohn's Painting, and The Artist Meets the Critic (Coauthored by Leila Daw). Professor Kohn passed away on April 5, 2014.