Keynes Hayek The Clash That Defined Modern Economics

Download or read book Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics written by Nicholas Wapshott and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I defy anybody—Keynesian, Hayekian, or uncommitted—to read [Wapshott’s] work and not learn something new.”—John Cassidy, The New Yorker As the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the world into turmoil, two men emerged with competing claims on how to restore balance to economies gone awry. John Maynard Keynes, the mercurial Cambridge economist, believed that government had a duty to spend when others would not. He met his opposite in a little-known Austrian economics professor, Freidrich Hayek, who considered attempts to intervene both pointless and potentially dangerous. The battle lines thus drawn, Keynesian economics would dominate for decades and coincide with an era of unprecedented prosperity, but conservative economists and political leaders would eventually embrace and execute Hayek's contrary vision. From their first face-to-face encounter to the heated arguments between their ardent disciples, Nicholas Wapshott here unearths the contemporary relevance of Keynes and Hayek, as present-day arguments over the virtues of the free market and government intervention rage with the same ferocity as they did in the 1930s.

Download or read book Keynes/Hayek written by Nicholas Wapshott and published by Scribe Publications. This book was released on 2011-10-31 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can government fix a broken economy? Two great economists disagreed 80 years ago, and their debate dominates politics to this day. As the stock-market crash of 1929 plunged the world into turmoil, two men emerged with competing claims about how to restore balance to economies gone awry. John Maynard Keynes, the mercurial Cambridge economist, believed that government had a duty to spend when others would not. He met his opposite in a little-known Austrian economics professor, Friedrich Hayek, who considered attempts to intervene both pointless and potentially dangerous. The battle lines thus drawn, Keynesian economics would dominate for decades and coincide with an era of unprecedented prosperity, but conservative economists and political leaders would eventually embrace and execute Hayek’s contrary vision. From their first face-to-face encounter to the heated disputes between their ardent disciples, Nicholas Wapshott here unearths the contemporary relevance of Keynes and Hayek, as arguments over the virtues of the free market and government intervention rage with the same ferocity as they did in the 1930s. PRAISE FOR NICHOLAS WAPSHOTT ‘I defy anybody — Keynesian, Hayekian, or uncommitted — to read [Wapshott’s] work and not learn something new.’ The New Yorker ‘With balance, understanding and clarity, Nicholas Wapshott, a New York-based English journalist and biographer, re-creates the duel between Keynes and Heyek … [T]his book is beguilingly written, well researched and cleverly argued.’ The Weekend Australian

Download or read book Keynes/Hayek written by Nicholas Wapshott and published by Scribe Publications. This book was released on 2011 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can government fix a broken economy? Two great economists disagreed eighty years ago, and their debate dominates politics to this day. As the stock-market crash of 1929 plunged the world into turmoil, two men emerged with competing claims about how to restore balance to economies gone awry. John Maynard Keynes, the mercurial Cambridge economist, believed that government had a duty to spend when others would not. He met his opposite in a little-known Austrian economics professor, Freidrich Hayek, who considered attempts to intervene both pointless and potentially dangerous. The battle lines thus drawn, Keynesian economics would dominate for decades and coincide with an era of unprecedented prosperity, but conservative economists and political leaders would eventually embrace and execute Hayek's contrary vision. From their first face-to-face encounter to the heated arguments between their ardent disciples, Nicholas Wapshott here unearths the contemporary relevance of Keynes and Hayek, as arguments over the virtues of the free market and government intervention rage with the same ferocity as they did in the 1930s. This is no mere academic debate – with the world economy teetering, the staked are very high for all of us.

Download or read book Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market written by Nicholas Wapshott and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Financial Times Best Economics Book of 2021 From the author of Keynes Hayek, the next great duel in the history of economics. In 1966 two columnists joined Newsweek magazine. Their assignment: debate the world of business and economics. Paul Samuelson was a towering figure in Keynesian economics, which supported the management of the economy along lines prescribed by John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory. Milton Friedman, little known at that time outside of conservative academic circles, championed “monetarism” and insisted the Federal Reserve maintain tight control over the amount of money circulating in the economy. In Samuelson Friedman, author and journalist Nicholas Wapshott brings narrative verve and puckish charm to the story of these two giants of modern economics, their braided lives and colossal intellectual battles. Samuelson, a forbidding technical genius, grew up a child of relative privilege and went on to revolutionize macroeconomics. He wrote the best-selling economics textbook of all time, famously remarking "I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws—or crafts its advanced treatises—if I can write its economics textbooks." His friend and adversary for decades, Milton Friedman, studied the Great Depression and with Anna Schwartz wrote the seminal books The Great Contraction and A Monetary History of the United States. Like Friedrich Hayek before him, Friedman found fortune writing a treatise, Capitalism and Freedom, that yoked free markets and libertarian politics in a potent argument that remains a lodestar for economic conservatives today. In Wapshott’s nimble hands, Samuelson and Friedman’s decades-long argument over how—or whether—to manage the economy becomes a window onto one of the longest periods of economic turmoil in the United States. As the soaring economy of the 1950s gave way to decades stalked by declining prosperity and "stagflation," it was a time when the theory and practice of economics became the preoccupation of politicians and the focus of national debate. It is an argument that continues today.

Download or read book The Clash of Economic Ideas written by Lawrence H. White and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-16 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book places economic debates in their historical context and outlines how economic ideas have influenced swings in policy.

Download or read book Mass Flourishing written by Edmund S. Phelps and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-19 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps draws on a lifetime of thinking to make a sweeping new argument about what makes nations prosper--and why the sources of that prosperity are under threat today. Why did prosperity explode in some nations between the 1820s and 1960s, creating not just unprecedented material wealth but "flourishing"--meaningful work, self-expression, and personal growth for more people than ever before? Phelps makes the case that the wellspring of this flourishing was modern values such as the desire to create, explore, and meet challenges. These values fueled the grassroots dynamism that was necessary for widespread, indigenous innovation. Most innovation wasn't driven by a few isolated visionaries like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs; rather, it was driven by millions of people empowered to think of, develop, and market innumerable new products and processes, and improvements to existing ones. Mass flourishing--a combination of material well-being and the "good life" in a broader sense--was created by this mass innovation. Yet indigenous innovation and flourishing weakened decades ago. In America, evidence indicates that innovation and job satisfaction have decreased since the late 1960s, while postwar Europe has never recaptured its former dynamism. The reason, Phelps argues, is that the modern values underlying the modern economy are under threat by a resurgence of traditional, corporatist values that put the community and state over the individual. The ultimate fate of modern values is now the most pressing question for the West: will Western nations recommit themselves to modernity, grassroots dynamism, indigenous innovation, and widespread personal fulfillment, or will we go on with a narrowed innovation that limits flourishing to a few? A book of immense practical and intellectual importance, Mass Flourishing is essential reading for anyone who cares about the sources of prosperity and the future of the West.

Download or read book Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher written by Nicholas Wapshott and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-11-08 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New details of the remarkable relationship between two leaders who teamed up to change history. It?s well known that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were close allies and kindred political spirits. During their eight overlapping years as U.S. president and UK prime minister, they stood united for free markets, low taxes, and a strong defense against communism. But just how close they really were will surprise you. Nicholas Wapshott finds that the Reagan-Thatcher relationship was much deeper than an alliance of mutual interests. Drawing on extensive interviews and hundreds of recently declassified private letters and telephone calls, he depicts a more complex, intimate, and occasionally combative relationship than has previously been revealed.