INET Executive Director Robert Johnson talks with Journal of Post Keynesian Economics co-founder Paul Davidson about Davidson’s book The Keynes Solution: The Path to Global Economic Prosperity.
Davidson discusses Keynes’s oft-forgotten insights into the foundational assumptions of economics. Classical economists were treated as “Euclidians in a non-Euclidian world,” Davidson says. “When they saw parallel lines intersecting they rebuked them for intersecting.” Keynes saw that the problem with Euclidean economics was what he called uncertainty, meaning the idea that the future cannot be predicted from the past — an insight that modern economics too often ignores.
Continue reading “Paul Davidson – Keynes’s Forgotten Lessons”
I was brought up, like most Englishmen, to respect free trade not only as an economic doctrine which a rational and instructed person could not doubt, but almost as a part of the moral law. I regarded ordinary departures from it as being at the same time an imbecility and an outrage. I thought England’s unshakable free trade convictions, maintained for nearly a hundred years, to be both the explanation before man and the justification before Heaven of her economic supremacy. As lately as 1923 I was writing that free trade was based on fundamental “truths” which, stated with their due qualifications, no one can dispute who is capable of understanding the meaning of the words.
Will the summer of 2010 be remembered as the time when we turned into a nation of sleepwalkers? We have heard reports of the intrusion of the state into everyday life, and of miscarriages of American power abroad. The reports made a stir, but as suddenly as they came they were gone. The last two weeks of July saw two such stories on almost successive days.
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