Keynes for Beginners

Book excerpt: John Maynard Keynes is among the most brilliant and influential economists of the 20th century. His revolutionary treatise written during the Great Depression of the 1930s, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, overturned the conventional free market wisdom of the time and proposed that a radical new way of creating a healthy economy and full employment depended on the total spending of consumers, business investors and governments. Frightened by mass unemployment, governments throughout the capitalist world pursued Keynesian policies until the 1970s when a new economic theory, monetarism, became fashionable. As monetarism failed to prevent the world entering another major recession, it is time to look at Keynesian remedies again.