One of the World’s Foremost Scholars of John Maynard Keynes Explains the Many Ways Keynes’s Insights are More Relevant Than Ever
The financial crisis of 2008 and the great global recession temporarily turned most economists into Keynesians as governments desperately turned to fiscal policy and massive government intervention to avoid a total market collapse. Yet as the worst fears subsided after a year, many of those same economists and governments went back to their same old free market habits.
Robert Skidelsky, one of the world’s foremost scholars on John Maynard Keynes, explains why in his wide-ranging video interview with INET. Skidelsky, the emeritus professor of political economy at Warwick University in England, wrote the definitive Keynes biography and has lived and breathed Keynes and all things Keynesian for much of his career, so he is especially well-suited to give the definitive answer about what Keynes would say were he alive today.
Skidelsky is particularly well suited to interpret Keynes’s current relevance after the recent publication of his book “The Return of the Master,” which explains the global crisis of 2008 from a Keynesian perspective and attempts to positively answer the question we face: When unbridled capitalism falters, is there an alternative?
In the INET video interview, Skidelsky explains “What would Keynes do” when faced with contemporary issues such as whether governments should continue stimulus investments or make austerity cutbacks, or what China and the United States might do to ease their financial tensions. But Skidelsky also talks about less well-known ideas from Keynes, such as his vision of utopia that was influenced by other intellectuals of his time, and bears some resemblance to that of Karl Marx.
You can watch the whole interview, or jump around and chose specific segments. We also encourage you to go to our Question and Answer Forum and give your answer, or rate the answers of others to the question:
"Like Keynes, we are living in a time of structural change and fundamental uncertainty, but in other respects our time is different from his. Is Keynes enough? What can we learn from him, and in what respect do we need to go beyond him?"
Comments
I have only just started my degree so forgive my simple answer: Keynes lived in a very different time and was well know for changing his mind in light of new information. Governments have to ring-fence "public-goods" from the free market and would probably do themselves a diservice by not redifining what has been typically considered a public-good. Another inherant problem with governments is that you effectively have publicly elected laymen being responsible for the legislation, management of specialist areas of societies needs such as education, health, economic policy along with everything else; it is not reasonble to think that these responsibilities can be effectively carried out by people who do not have the required expertise. It would help if the bank of england used a sharper tool than interest rates to manage the economy and it would be an improvement if key areas of government responsibility were managed by cross-party commitee's which also had health proffessionals on the commitee for health, education professional's on the the education comittee etc. In short a "mixed-economy". Keynes had the right heart and head and it seems only capitalist fundamentalists deride his contribution to economic thinking. The New Economic Foundation has published many reports with detailed ideas and alternatives to current economic thinking and I would suggest that you give them a look.
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