Full Employment: Gift Horse or Trojan Horse?

Kalecki's 1943 essay Political Aspects of Full Employment (PAFE) is widely recognised as a seminal essay in the theory of the political business cycle. The paper argues that PAFE may also be interpreted as an early recognition by Kalecki of the phenomenon of rent seeking. Kalecki's discussion of the rent-seeking behavior of businessmen is shown to have anticipated Olson's subsequent theory of distributional coalitions. A Kalecki-Olson analysis provides an explanation for the movement in income shares in the UK since 1975.