Production Versus Consumption

by George Reisman

This pamphlet shows why the production of wealth, not the artificial creation of the need and desire to consume, is the fundamental problem of economic life. It develops the implications of these opposing basic economic premises for understanding the economic effects of machinery, war, government spending, population growth, advertising, technological progress, and inflation. The subject of a full Newsweek column by Henry Hazlitt, when it originally appeared in The Freeman, the pamphlet is an antidote to much of the error in contemporary macroeconomics courses inspired by Keynes.

Genres: Economics

11 pages, Paperback

First published October 31, 1991

About the author

George Reisman, Ph.D., is Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics, and the author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (Ottawa, Illinois: Jameson Books, 1996; Kindle Edition, 2012), The Government Against the Economy; Warren Buffett, Class Warfare, and the Exploitation Theory; The Benevolent Nature of Capitalism and Other Essays; Labor Unions, Thugs, and Strom Troopers; and, most recently, Piketty's Capital: Wrong Theory/Destructive Program. His website is capitalism.net. His blog is georgereismansblog.blogspot.com. See his Amazon.com author's page and follow him on Twitter @GGReisman.

Dr. Reisman is married to Edith Packer, J.D., Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, with whom he lives in Laguna Hills, California.

He was personally a student of Ludwig von Mises, whose NYU seminar he attended for eight years and under whom he obtained his doctorate in economics in 1963. He is the translator of von Mises's Epistemological Problems of Economics (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1960). From1957 until her death in 1982, he was an associate of Ayn Rand.