Larry Summers

I agree with basic income, but most analyses of it are backwards.

For most of history, governments addressed unemployment by starting wars. By shipping off to war, the unemployed temporarily get a job. They either come back dead or ready to take a new job in an economy revitalized by the stimulus of government war spending.

John Maynard Keynes noticed this pattern, especially during the Great Depression and WW2, and made a brilliant suggestion: continue with these government interventions, but keep the government spending and drop the war part. We call it "Keynesian economics", but really, what Keynes invented was capitalist peace. And guess what, since then, no two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's. [1]

We need a Keynesian boost today, not because of technological progress, but rather the contrary: the rapid technological progress of the 20th century that brought tremendous economic prosperity to humanity has finally come to a grinding halt. Let's stop denying this. The stream of lifechanging breakthrough inventions of the 20th century, from A (antibiotics) to Z (zippers), have ended. As a result, we now suffer from secular stagnation, something Keynes understood very well back then, and Larry Summers understands in the present. [2]

It's especially absurd to claim that automation is the cause of this. Automation has already upended society: it was called the Industrial Revolution and happened 200 years…

I disagree. Not only can we no longer build large things, we are barely able to maintain the things we have. I lived in Cambridge MA during the repair of the Anderson Memorial Bridge, described here: http://larrysummers.com/2016/05/31/a-lesson-on-infrastructure-from-the-anderson-bridge-fiasco/ . Fixing a very modest bridge across a placid river took years, and cost far more than the inflation-adjusted original cost of the bridge (took longer than the original construction too!).

Look at NASA's marvelous manned space program. It has less manned launch capability than the agency had when the Mercury program was active. But they still spend money, doing extremely important things like sending "astronauts" to camp out on Mauna Loa and pretend they're on Mars.

>The savings glut is caused by ... There is not much investment happening in our economy

There is not much investment in the economy because there is not much demand. There is not much demand because of income and wealth inequality.

After all, what's the point of producing goods and services for people who can't afford them?

>http://larrysummers.com/category/secular-stagnation/

Any economics projections made by Larry Summers ought to be taken with a metric ton of salt. After all, his track record at gambling with Harvard's money is just abysmal:

http://www.alternet.org/economy/larry-summers-federal-reserve

Can you give a citation on "bipartisan support among economists"? All I have read seems to indicate economists are all in support for the other direction - that lowering corporate taxes at this moment is bad economics.

[1] http://larrysummers.com/2017/10/22/one-last-time-on-who-benefits-from-corporate-tax-cuts/

[2] https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/corporate-rate-cuts-are-a-poor-way-to-help-the-economy-and-most-workers-and

[3] http://microeconomicinsights.org/benefits-corporate-tax-cuts-evidence-local-us-labour-markets/