Leading economists revisit a provocative essay by John Maynard Keynes, debating Keynes's vision of growth, inequality, work, leisure, entrepreneurship, consumerism, and the search for happiness in the twenty-first century. In 1931 distinguished economist John Maynard Keynes published a short essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in his collection Essays in Persuasion. In the essay, he expressed optimism for the economic future despite the doldrums of the post-World War I years and the onset of the Great Depression. Keynes imagined that by 2030 the standard of living would be dramatically higher; people, liberated from want (and without the desire to consume for the sake of consumption), would work no more than fifteen hours a week, devoting the rest of their time to leisure and culture. In Revisiting Keynes, leading contemporary economists consider what Keynes got right in his essay—the rise in the standard of living, for example—and what he got wrong—such as a shortened work week and consumer satiation. In so doing, they raise challenging questions about the world economy and contemporary lifestyles in the twenty-first century. The contributors—among them, four Nobel laureates in economics—point out that although Keynes correctly predicted economic growth, he neglected the problems of distribution and inequality. Keynes overestimated the desire of people to stop working and underestimated the pleasures and rewards of work—perhaps basing his idea of “economic bliss” on the life of the English gentleman or the ideals of his Bloomsbury group friends. In Revisiting Keynes, Keynes's short essay—usually seen as a minor divertissement compared to his other more influential works—becomes the catalyst for a lively debate among some of today's top economists about economic growth, inequality, wealth, work, leisure, culture, and consumerism. Contributors William J. Baumol, Leonardo Becchetti, Gary S. Becker, Michele Boldrin, Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Robert H. Frank, Richard B. Freeman, Benjamin M. Friedman, Axel Leijonhufvud, David K. Levine, Lee E. Ohanian, Edmund S. Phelps, Luis Rayo, Robert Solow, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Fabrizio Zilibotti

Leading economists revisit a provocative essay by John Maynard Keynes, debating Keynes's vision of growth, inequality, work, leisure, entrepreneurship, consumerism, and the search for happiness in the twenty-first century.

The Great Recession of 2008 restored John Maynard Keynes to prominence. After decades when the Keynesian revolution seemed to have been forgotten, the great British theorist was suddenly everywhere. The New York Times asked, “What would Keynes have done?” The Financial Times wrote of “the undeniable shift to Keynes.” Le Monde pronounced the economic collapse Keynes’s “revenge.” Two years later, following bank bailouts and Tea Party fundamentalism, Keynesian principles once again seemed misguided or irrelevant to a public focused on ballooning budget deficits. In this readable account, Backhouse and Bateman elaborate the misinformation and caricature that have led to Keynes’s repeated resurrection and interment since his death in 1946. Keynes’s engagement with social and moral philosophy and his membership in the Bloomsbury Group of artists and writers helped to shape his manner of theorizing. Though trained as a mathematician, he designed models based on how specific kinds of people (such as investors and consumers) actually behave—an approach that runs counter to the idealized agents favored by economists at the end of the century. Keynes wanted to create a revolution in the way the world thought about economic problems, but he was more open-minded about capitalism than is commonly believed. He saw capitalism as essential to a society’s well-being but also morally flawed, and he sought a corrective for its main defect: the failure to stabilize investment. Keynes’s nuanced views, the authors suggest, offer an alternative to the polarized rhetoric often evoked by the word “capitalism” in today’s political debates.

John Maynard Keynes, then a rising young economist, participated in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 as chief representative of the British Treasury and advisor to Prime Minister David Lloyd George. He resigned after desperately trying and failing to reduce the huge demands for reparations being made on Germany. The Economic Consequences of the Peace is Keynes' brilliant and prophetic analysis of the effects that the peace treaty would have both on Germany and, even more fatefully, the world.

The financial crisis and the economic crisis that followed triggered a crisis in the subject of economics, as it is typically being taught today especially in macroeconomics and related fields. A renewed interest in earlier authors, especially the classical economists from Adam Smith to David Ricardo and John Maynard Keynes, developed. This book may also be seen as a response to this interest. What can we learn from the authors mentioned, what we could not learn from the mainstream? This volume contains a selection of essays which deepens and widens the understanding of the classical approach to important problems, such as value and distribution, growth and technical progress, and exhaustible natural resources. It is the fourth collection in a row and reflects an on-going discussion of the fecundity of the classical approach. A main topic of the essays is a comparison between the classical approaches with modern theory and thus an identification of what can be learned by elaborating on the ideas of Smith and Ricardo and Marx above and beyond and variously in contradiction to certain mainstream view. Since the work of Piero Sraffa spurred the revival of classical economic thought, his contributions are dealt with in some detail. The attention then focuses on economic growth and the treatment of exhaustible resources within a classical framework of the analysis.

At the height of the Great Depression a number of leading U.S. economists advanced a proposal for monetary reform that became known as the Chicago Plan. It envisaged the separation of the monetary and credit functions of the banking system, by requiring 100% reserve backing for deposits. Irving Fisher (1936) claimed the following advantages for this plan: (1) Much better control of a major source of business cycle fluctuations, sudden increases and contractions of bank credit and of the supply of bank-created money. (2) Complete elimination of bank runs. (3) Dramatic reduction of the (net) public debt. (4) Dramatic reduction of private debt, as money creation no longer requires simultaneous debt creation. We study these claims by embedding a comprehensive and carefully calibrated model of the banking system in a DSGE model of the U.S. economy. We find support for all four of Fisher's claims. Furthermore, output gains approach 10 percent, and steady state inflation can drop to zero without posing problems for the conduct of monetary policy.