----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- I agree with Greg that the war years were vital to the acceptance of the Keynesian framework, but I would like to suggest a further rather mundane reason, at least as far as the UK is concerned. At the start of the war Keynes argued that it would be necessary to hold down private demand to accommodate war spending without excessive inflation. This was generally accepted as common sense, even by those who rejected Keynesian economics in a wider sense. But that implied that a main function of government policy was to manage aggregate demand, and they set about doing it (or trying to do it). At the end of the war it was still necessary to suppress pent-up demand to free resources for rebuilding exports, reconstruction, etc. There was no clear-cut end to the reconstruction period, so the British economy emerged into peacetime with a government machine which saw the management of aggregate demand as a meaningful thing to do and as one of its main responsibilities. Policy debates were carried out in those terms, economists were employed to advise on it, etc. The practical, if not the intellectual, case was won for a generation. Tony Brewer ([log in to unmask]) ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]