Features

With mass unemployment again afflicting the world, it’s time to rediscover Keynes — the real Keynes.

During the postwar boom, it seemed that mass unemployment had been cured forever. A mixed economy–based on activist government, deficit spending, public investment, strong trade-unionism, a welfare state, and a warfare state–kept the industrial West on a high-growth path. Living standards rose steadily. Satisfied voters returned to office politicians who believed in this model. Not […]

Let’s have responsive government, but in the end a citizen cannot be reduced to a consumer.

Two cheers for the Gore Report. The vice president is good on repairing the means, oddly silent on the ends.

Economics as a subject matter and, in its more than slightly fragile way, as a science, has two notable features. There is a plausible characteristic of the economy, well supported by both analysis and experience, that gets relatively little mention. And there is a related aspect of the economic system that is wholly proscribed in […]

Economics follows the wrong model of physics. Keynes appreciated that jobs, savings, and growth are all relative.