Keynes is back. President Obama's economic stimulus package is based on the premise that we can spend our way out of recession. It is an application of the Keynesian multiplier theory, which was expounded in Keynes' 1936 economic treatise, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money....

The financial crisis of 2008 has challenged the reputation of the free-market economy in the public imagination in a way that it has not been challenged since the Great Depression. The intellectual consensus after World War II was that markets are unstable and exploitive and thus in need of...

Right-wing critics of Keynes have often suggested that he was a socialist. His policy proposals were very often described as a slippery slope that would lead society into a totalitarian nightmare. Alternatively, from the left, Keynes was often seen as a reformist that intended to preserve the...

Keynes attempted, in the general theory to develop a theory of the business cycle. However, this attempt was rather underwhelming given the significance of the subject matter. In this paper, our primary course of concern is not to give a scathing review overall, but rather to detail the...

The economic paradigms of Ludwig von Mises on the one hand and of John Maynard Keynes on the other have been correctly recognized as antithetical at the theoretical level, and as antagonistic with respect to their practical and public policy implications. Characteristically they have also been...

The Great Recession seems to be creating a change in the trend of macroeconomic thinking. Prior to the financial crisis of 2008, dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models dominated the macroeconomics literature without any apparent challengers on the horizon. Since then, however, we...

Professor Axel Leijonhufvud passed away few months ago, at the age of 89. Despite the fact that the contribution he made to economics has been widely recognized, his approach remains 'problematic' because of his dialogue and proximity with different streams of thought, and in particular with the...

This paper explores the intellectual history of the state, or chartalist, approach to money, from the early developers (Georg Friedrich Knapp and A. Mitchell Innes) through Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes, and Abba Lerner, and on to modern exponents Hyman Minsky, Charles Goodhart, and...

Robert Neild (born 1924) has made a major contribution to economics and to peace studies. This paper provides a brief sketch of Neild's life and work. While noting his research in economic policy and peace studies, this essay devotes more attention to his largely-unnoticed contributions to...