Book description
In the current financial crisis Keynes has been taken out of his
cupboard, dusted down, consulted, cited, invoked and appealed to about
why events have taken the course they have and how a rescue operation
can be effected. Why have we gone back so emphatically to the ideas of
an economist who died fifty years ago?
There are three main ideas of Keynes's worth thinking about now. The
first is that the future is unknowable, and therefore that economic
storms, especially those originating in the financial system, are not
random shocks which impinge on smoothly-adjusting markets, but part of
the normal working of the market system. The second idea is that
economies wounded by these 'shocks' can, if left to themselves, stay
in a depressed condition for a long time. That is why governments need
to have and use fiscal ammunition to prevent a slide from financial
crisis to economic depression. The third concerns what he termed
'organicism': societies are communities not, as he put it,
'branches of the multiplication table'. This limited his support for
the pursuit of efficiency at all costs. The ideas of John Maynard
Keynes have never been more timely.
