The substantial questions of macroeconomics itself are very old, going back to the origins of economics itself. But professional self-consciousness of the distinction between macroeconomics and microeconomics dates only to the 1930s. The distinction was drawn quite independently of Keynes, yet...

Samuelson and Solow in their 1960 paper in the American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings were among the first economists to engage with Phillips' famous unemployment/wage-inflation analysis, now referred to as the Phillips curve. They addressed the question of the relevance of Phillips's...

Macroeconomics faced substantial internal and external criticism related to the 2007-09 financial crisis. Much of it was based on the unsustainable idea that its goal could or should be unconditional forecasting of business cycles. Critics specially singled out dynamic, stochastic...

The explicit concepts of a central bank and monetary policy were not fully articulated until the 20th century, although, with some degree of circumspection, they can be used retrospectively in regard to earlier times. The oldest central banks were hardly central banks in the modern sense at...

The Great Recession and the financial crisis of 2007-09 prompted ca lls for fundamental reforms of economic theory. The role of theory in economics and in recent economic events is considered in light of two recen t books: the sociologist Richard Swedberg's The Art of Social Theory and the...

Four talks on Keynes in relation to the Bloomsbury Group: I. Maynard Keynes of Bloomsbury (Craufurd Goodwin); II. Keynes as Policy Advisor (E. Roy Weintraub); III. Keynes and Economics (Kevin D. Hoover); IV. Keynes and Hayek (Bruce Caldwell). The talks were delivered as part of roundtable...