The current global financial and economic crisis has called for the revival of Keynesian theory. This sixth volume in the International Papers in Political Economy (IPPE) series focuses on twenty first century Keynesian economics in terms of both theory and application.

Back to the future: a heterodox economist rewrites Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money to serve as the basis for a macroeconomics for the twenty-first century. John Maynard Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money was the most influential economic idea of the twentieth century. But, argues Stephen Marglin, its radical implications were obscured by Keynes's lack of the mathematical tools necessary to argue convincingly that the problem was the market itself, as distinct from myriad sources of friction around its margins. Marglin fills in the theoretical gaps, revealing the deeper meaning of the General Theory. Drawing on eight decades of discussion and debate since the General Theory was published, as well as on his own research, Marglin substantiates Keynes's intuition that there is no mechanism within a capitalist economy that ensures full employment. Even if deregulating the economy could make it more like the textbook ideal of perfect competition, this would not address the problem that Keynes identified: the potential inadequacy of aggregate demand. Ordinary citizens have paid a steep price for the distortion of Keynes's message. Fiscal policy has been relegated to emergencies like the Great Recession. Monetary policy has focused unduly on inflation. In both cases the underlying rationale is the false premise that in the long run at least the economy is self-regulating so that fiscal policy is unnecessary and inflation beyond a modest 2 percent serves no useful purpose. Fleshing out Keynes's intuition that the problem is not the warts on the body of capitalism but capitalism itself, Raising Keynes provides the foundation for a twenty-first-century macroeconomics that can both respond to crises and guide long-run policy.

This book is devoted to the lasting impact of The General Theory (and Keynes’s thought) on macroeconomic theory, methodology and its relevance for understanding the post-crisis challenges of the 21st Century. A number of contributions take their departure from Keynes's presentation during the 1930's of his new macroeconomic understanding and its policy implications. Other chapters take a more pluralistic view of Keynes's ideas and their importance for contemporary debates. Further, it is demonstrated that many textbooks often misrepresent The General Theory and therefore cannot be a reliable guide to 21st Century economic policy.

This book combines historical and policy-oriented perspectives on the relevance of the Keynesian approach for economic theory, policy, and crisis analysis. The first part focuses on historical, theoretical, and methodological issues, and puts them in context with current developments. The second part focuses on the application of the Keynesian approach to modeling the economy, policy-making, and analyzing the ongoing crisis of the early 21st century. Bringing together contributions by leading macroeconomists such as Laidler, Cukierman, Colander and Boyer, and leading historians of economics such as Hollander, Boianovsky, Marcuzzo, Dimand, Witztum, Young, deVroey and Arnon, the book offers a comprehensive overview of Keynesian economics today. One of the book’s most essential features are the commentaries on the papers, which promote a cross-fertilization between macroeconomists and historians of economics, providing, in conjunction with the papers themselves, a balanced outlook on the current relevance of Keynesian economics.

The simple message of Eatwell & Milgate's Fall and Rise of Keynesian Economics is that it was inevitable that Keynesian economics would rise again when circumstances conspired to make it apparent that conventional macroeconomic thinking had lost its way and was unable to explain satisfactorily the most outstanding feature of our actual experience: financial instabilty and its effect on real economic activity.

“I defy anybody—Keynesian, Hayekian, or uncommitted—to read [Wapshott’s] work and not learn something new.”—John Cassidy, The New Yorker As the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the world into turmoil, two men emerged with competing claims on how to restore balance to economies gone awry. John Maynard Keynes, the mercurial Cambridge economist, believed that government had a duty to spend when others would not. He met his opposite in a little-known Austrian economics professor, Freidrich Hayek, who considered attempts to intervene both pointless and potentially dangerous. The battle lines thus drawn, Keynesian economics would dominate for decades and coincide with an era of unprecedented prosperity, but conservative economists and political leaders would eventually embrace and execute Hayek's contrary vision. From their first face-to-face encounter to the heated arguments between their ardent disciples, Nicholas Wapshott here unearths the contemporary relevance of Keynes and Hayek, as present-day arguments over the virtues of the free market and government intervention rage with the same ferocity as they did in the 1930s.

This book provides a much-needed re-examination of monetary and fiscal policies, their application in the real world and their potential for macroeconomic policy in the 21st century. It provides a detailed discussion and critique of the 'new consensus' in macroeconomics along with the monetary and fiscal policies encapsulated within it. The authors argue that monetary policy is an ineffective means of controlling inflation and, if not used properly, can also have detrimental effects on the supply-side of the economy. They further contend that fiscal policy remains a potent instrument for influencing aggregate demand. Using detailed analysis the authors emphasise the role of capacity constraints as possible inflation barriers and argue against the NAIRU as a labour market phenomenon. The book concludes by critically examining the economic policies of the European Economic and Monetary Union. Written by two of the leading scholars in the field, this provocative new volume is concise, well argued and rich in new insights. It will interest all those concerned with the current problems and future development of monetary and fiscal policy.