"An optimist who lived at a time when the world economy was running so badly that clever gimmicks could still work wonders, Keynes's object was to save capitalism from itself. In the end, his prescription in its most simple form self-destructed, as the obligation to run a full-employment humanitarian state caused modern economies to succumb to the new disease of stagflation - high inflation along with joblessness and excess capacity. Economists of the most diverse views are constantly asking themselves: What would Keynes advise if he were now alive. And usually - whether the economist is a free-marketeer like Friederick von Hayek or one with strong interventionist leanings like John Kenneth Galbraith - they pay Keynes the supreme compliment of believing that if brought back to earth, Maynard would be favoring just what each of them happens to favor. One also might wonder what Lord Keynes would prescribe for the huge structural deficit of Ronald Reagan, with the crowding out of investment that it implies once the American economy reattains high levels of employment."
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Historians from EnglandPhilosophers from EnglandUniversity of Cambridge facultyEconomists from EnglandSociologists from England
Original Language: English
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Sources
Paul Samuelson, "The House That Keynes Built", The New York Times (May 29, 1983)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes
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John Maynard Keynes
1883 – 1946
Britischer Nationalökonom
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