Steven,

Your question is far from uninteresting. Perhaps this is not the right forum to answer this question. You need to consult the department of macroeconomics. There, the last Keynesian left the building decades ago. My generation was brought up doing macro along the lines of Blanchard and Fischer (1989). We visited seminars of Paul Romer, who bluntly declared that he 'hated the government'. I never felt at home with the New Keynesians and their focus on the proper proper microfoundations for their Keynesian models. Here the message is one of technique rather than policy. In that regard it is not surprising that 'post'  Keynesians (whatever that means) argue that such models ignore the 'real' message of the General Theory, namely that the economy inhibits fundamental uncertainty. What I am trying to say is that old-style Keynesianism with aggregate demand and all that is terribly out of vogue with modern macroeconomists. To make it worse, the majority of them has absolutely no idea what Austrian economics means.  


Bert Tieben

Amsterdam, The Netherlands
-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Namens Steve Kates
Verzonden: maandag 5 december 2011 8:24
Aan: [log in to unmask]
Onderwerp: Re: [SHOE] Critics of Keynes and Keynesian Economics

In its own way, the sparse response to my original query has sort of confirmed my suspicions that there is not all that much in an anti-Keynesian way being written. I cannot tell whether this lack of response is because the question is uninteresting or because there really is no one whose views one could readily point to. 

Moreover, Alan Isaac wrote about the question that  

"I have no idea what this even means. Would an anti-Keynesian position be an ideological stance?  In which case, who cares?  Or would it be an empirical stance, so that e.g. physicists should say that Einstein had an 'anti-Newtonian' position? One might hope that economists would not be 'pro' or 'anti' past analyses but would simply grapple with the evidence the best they can." 

Yet I do think even he must know what my question means since the stimulus over the past two years has been termed Keynesian time and again. Being Keynesian in theoretical terms means accepting the notion of aggregate demand as a force independent of aggregate supply acting on the level of economic activity - AS-AD. IS-LM, C+I+G and that sort of thing. And in policy terms, being Keynesian reflects a belief that the stimulus created a net improvement in the level of economic activity - or more importantly perhaps, in the rate of unemployment - compared with what would have prevailed had there been no stimulus. 

I know that if you are an Austrian economist, then you would think there had been no value in the stimulus. But is there no one else? Are we really all Keynesian now unless we're Austrians? 



Dr Steven Kates
School of Economics, Finance
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RMIT University
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