The intellectual battle now under way between the
Keynesians and the Bocconi boys is fundamental not just to economics, but also to basic issues in social and political organisation.
(8) For a classic discussion of the ideas separating
Keynesians and Monetarists, see Mayor (1978, Chapter 1, pp.
Faced with the crisis itself, the New
Keynesians had risen to the challenge.
'Keynes was in no way the first
Keynesian', Geoff Mann announces in the preface to this important--and highly readable--book.
Our conviction, which we will spell out at greater length in our forthcoming book, The
Keynesian Revolution and Economic Materialism: We're All Dead (Palgrave Macmillan), is that the economic/cultural dichotomy not only dominates how we think about our problem; it is a key cause of the problem.
I spy a bit of a problem for you, since you are not a member of the Austrian school, but, rather, a different type of, wait for it:
Keynesian! That is, in my view, there are the fiscal
Keynesians, and the monetarist
Keynesians.
Mainstream economics became
Keynesian from the late 1930s through the 1970s.
While
Keynesians spent the 1960s congratulating each other, not everyone had jumped onto the Phillips Curve bandwagon.
Chapters 8 and 9 look at the ways in which various dissenters from the microfoundations dogma--Old
Keynesians, Post-Keynesians, the Austrians, Old Institutionalists--have approached the connection between macroeconomic and microeconomic phenomena.
Today the dispute has turned to the
Keynesians versus the Austerians (shouldn't they get a capital letter if the other two schools do?) Inflation has become a non-issue in recent years.
Given the desirable nature of government budget deficits for
Keynesians, why do they care about them and why should they adopt an "austerity policy"?
The government spending decline deserves a word because the
Keynesians are using it to call for more "stimulus." The national income accounts include a
Keynesian bias that equates higher government spending with growth, no matter how wasteful the spending.
(3) It ought to be a puzzle how the phrase "Say's Law" came to be used by Keynes, but in typical
Keynesian fashion the issue is avoided, because even to ask how Keynes came to use this term would raise many questions
Keynesians would prefer left alone.
Yale University Professor Robert Shiller--an economist who was one of the few
Keynesians to predict the housing bubble and bust of 2002-2008--called massive government "stimulus" spending during the recession a grand
Keynesian "experiment." He told CNBC reporters from the Davos Economic Summit on January 28, 2010, "The recent recovery was a wonderful experiment in
Keynesian economics, but there isn't uniform support for these things.
Wapshott believes modern economics is bifurcated between interventionist
Keynesians and anti-interventionist Hayekians.
