Author Archive
Raising Keynes
But apart from this contemporary mood, the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Taken from The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money pg 383 by John Maynard Keynes As far as I am concerned what you are about to read can only be described (in the British vernacular) as ‘brilliant’. Brian manages to bring to life the times and importance of Keynes in his introduction to The General Theory taught as a 4th year seminar course at the University of Guelph. It should be read by all who love or hate Keynesian economics. (Those who don’t really care are of course exempt.) If you are interested at all, you will find this text a pleasure to read. Evie Adomait See SSRN downloads for all of his lecturesLectures on Keynes’ General Theory by Professor Brian Ferguson winter 2013:
Lecture 1: Chapter One, Background and Historical Setting Introduction: John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Prices[1] is one of those rare books which actually deserves to be labeled revolutionary. Regardless of one’s take on Keynesian macroeconomics, the publication of the General Theory marked a major change in the way economists thought about macroeconomic issues. Indeed, Keynes can be credited with (or slammed for) creating the concept of macroeconomics. Arguably, prior to the General Theory, most professional economists thought of the macroeconomy in a general equilibrium sense, as an aggregate of a large number of individual markets, and they assumed that the analysis of how individual markets behaved could be carried over pretty much unchanged to the collection of markets which constituted the economy as a whole. There was, it seemed, no need to think of the economy as anything other than the sum of its parts, and an understanding of how those parts worked was sufficient to understand how the economy as a whole worked. After the General Theory, that no longer held. Economists started to think in terms of aggregates.