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Introduction For John King, author of A History of Post Keynesian Economics since 1936 , post-Keynesian economics is ‘a dissident school of thought in macroeconomics’. 1 His book traced post-Keynesian economics back to 1936, the year when The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money , by John Maynard Keynes, was published. This was important to establish the legitimacy of the dissenting tradition he represented, demonstrating that the economists who formed the subject of his book were
Introduction Keynesian scholarship is enormous and diverse. It is impossible to know, much less to present, this contradictory richness in a single chapter. Rather than feigning an overview of the literature, the chapter sketches three broad trajectories to make an argument that each of these strands of the Keynesian critique remain limited by an ambiguous and unsatisfactory break with neo-classical economics. The problem can perhaps be couched in terms of the analogy with physics mentioned in the Introduction. Keynes saw his theory as general in the same
Introduction Blaug writes, ‘[t]here were two Keynesian revolutions: the revolution in economic policy and the revolution in theoretical opinion within the economics profession’ ( 1994 : 1212). This chapter focusses on the policy and practice, the remarkable post-WWII boom and its unravelling in the 1970s. The next chapter looks at the theory. It is in the sense of policy reorientation that the quarter-century from the end of WWII until the 1970s is most often understood as a Keynesian age. Indeed, for many accounts, it is this period of managed capitalism
governments kept privatizing, deregulating and lowering taxes. But up until 2010 neither substantially reduced their spending nor stopped trying to stimulate economic activity. They instead found alternative revenue sources and attempted to achieve economic stimuli through other more covert means. In effect, pseudo-forms of Keynesian-style demand management continued behind the scenes. Tory and Labour configurations of pseudo-Keynesianism took different forms. They emerged out of compromises between Treasury restrictions and party
anti-Keynesian. The second section argues, however, that structural shifts have weakened national bases of economic organisation, potentially limiting the scope and efficacy, and crucially also the institutional supports, of Keynesian intervention. The growth of finance and of financial power alongside industrial ‘globalisation’ pull in an anti-Keynesian direction. There is a vast, if contested, literature which suggests this restructuring also means that any future return towards Keynes becomes more difficult. There are, at least, powerful vested interests in
This book sees Keynes as neither villain nor hero and develops a sympathetic ‘left’ critique. Keynes was an avowedly elitist and pro-capitalist economist, whom the left should appropriate with caution. But his analysis provides insights at a level of concreteness which Marx’s analysis largely ignored and which were concerned with issues of the modern world which Marx could not have foreseen. A critical Marxist engagement can simultaneously increase the power of Keynes’s insight and enrich Marxism. To understand Keynes, whose work is liberally invoked but seldom read, the book first puts Keynes in context, explaining his biography and the extraordinary times in which he lived, his philosophy and his politics. The book describes Keynes’s developing critique of ‘the classics’, of mainstream economics as he found it, and summarises the General Theory. It shows how Keynes provides an enduringly valuable critique of orthodoxy but vital insights rather than a genuinely general theory. The book then develops a Marxist appropriation of Keynes’s insights. It argues that Marxist analysis of unemployment, of money and interest, and of the role of the state can be enriched through such a critical engagement. The book addresses Keynesianism after Keynes, critically reviewing the practices that came to be known as ‘Keynesianism’ and different theoretical traditions that have claimed his legacy. It considers the crisis of the 1970s, the subsequent anti-Keynesian turn, the economic and ecological crises of the twenty-first century, and the prospects of returning to Keynes and Keynesianism.
There are good reasons to revisit Keynes. The global financial and economic crisis of the 2000s punctured some of the hubris around unrestrained markets. The coronavirus crisis again confirmed that governments could mobilise resources to counter both the disease and economic contraction. Keynesian ideas regained credibility and found new audiences. Much of what Keynes said in the 1930s seems to fit: against austerity, about economic uncertainty, about money and financial assets, about income inequality and effective demand, about the need for balance in the
associated with the left, and repudiated by the right . . . The fact that the political battle today is waged mainly on ground chosen by the left is remarkable evidence of the change in national ideology . . . (C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, 1956: 28–9, 61) While it may be read in other ways, The Future of Socialism can be seen as a paean to the ascendancy of Keynesian social democracy. In Crosland’s view of things, demand management had delivered full or near-full employment; affluence was on offer to a growing proportion of the working population with class
bring confidence to the markets and MUP_CoulterNagle_Printer3.indd 73 24/04/2015 16:36 74 The political economy of crisis in Ireland investment will resume. This has drawn on a prestigious international literature which purported to challenge the need for state spending during a downturn. The key text that tackled earlier Keynesian notions of a need for a stimulus to help economies out of recession came from Rheinhart and Rogdoff.23 Here it was suggested 90 percent of GDP was the threshold beyond which levels of sovereign debt would precipitate decline and so
capitalism is making a huge impact. Quite the opposite is true, to the extent 20 European social democracy under global economic crisis that social democracy is apparently wavering between a continuing adjustment to the constraints of neo-liberal globalisation and the search for an improbable continent-wide ‘green high-tech Keynesianism’. The purpose of this chapter is therefore to explain the reasons for this situation, focusing on the relationship social democracy has forged with the capitalist economy and the European institutions. Our discussion kicks off by looking