John Lindauer

John Howard Lindauer II (born November 20, 1937) is an American economist and author. Among his early articles and books, published in the 1960s while he was an Associate Professor of Economics and then Professor at Claremont, are “Land Taxation and Indian Economic Development” (with Sarjit Singh) and various editions of his epic “Macroeconomics” which were translated into Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, and Portugese.

Professor Lindauer’s most recent work is “The General Theories of Inflation, Unemployment, and Government Deficits” (2013). It is a reissue of his 1960s work aimed at professional economists and updated by his graduate students from their class notes. It was released concurrently with an everyman’s edition (without the math) for journalists and Federal Reserve governors entitled “Inflation, Unemployment, and Government Deficits: End Them.”

He has been a visiting professor at the University of California (SD), Sussex University, and Punjab University.

His favorite quote is “General theories and policies that cannot explain or cope with specific events are not general theories and policies and must be either discarded or improved.”

Lindauer is most known for his groundbreaking 1960s integration of aggregate supply with aggregate demand and his use of that integration to present and analyze various new theories and explanations of unemployment and inflation and the various new monetary policies that must be used to combat unemployment when there is sustained economic stagnation such as exists in the United States today.

In essence, Lindauer explained why today’s prevailing macroeconomics orthodoxy is flawed and presented the first viable alternatives to the then (and still) prevailing attempts by the economics professoriate and Federal Reserve to explain and analyze the macroeconomic problems and policies of the US in terms of today’s prevailing macroeconomic orthodoxy.

For example, he was the first (1966) to move beyond the then - and still - prevailing macroeconomics orthodoxy by demonstrating why efforts to fight unemployment with conventional monetary and fiscal policies might cause unemployment to rise instead of fall; why the use of conventional monetary and fiscal policies to fight inflation might actually cause the general level of prices to rise; why conventional monetary and fiscal policies might become ineffective during times of prolonged economic stagnation; and which policies will work and which will not under various conditions such as the economic stagnation that exists today in the United States and various other economies. He was also the first to explain and analyze why and when (eg. 2009-2014) central banks would have no alternative but to directly inject reserves into the real economy, and how that might be done, and why and when the Federal Reserve’s use of its primary dealers would not work.

Lindauer is married to Dorothy Oremus, a corporate director and attorney with offices in Chicago. He can be reached via j3981125@yahoo.com.