Do you respect John Maynard Keynes, as a thinker, as an economist, as a man?
I do.
"I'm not a fan of Murray Rothbard." -- David D. Friedman
I don't respect him 'as a thinker', because he switched positions, was enormously childish when criticized, didn't respect intellectual honesty and so on and so forth.
I don't respect him 'as an economist' because he didn't make any valuable contributions; neither empirical, nor theoretical. And he was just dead wrong in the big amount of straw mans he attacked.
I don't respect him as a man because, as far as I know, he did some fishy things in politics, e.g. the negotiation on the new economic system. And he was enormously arrogant; as shown in the general theory, and essays like the end of laissez-faire.
The only thing that is (sort of) valuable is his economic consequences of the peace and his contributions on probability, as far as I know.
So 'what' exactly do you respect?
The state is not the enemy. The idea of the state is.
"I do."
Ok... and why should I care?
AdrianHealey:So 'what' exactly do you respect?
Every theorist, every activist, wishes for world peace and thinks his very best idea will bring precisely that. Sadly, theories tested bring results. Empirically, Keynes' theories on economics only work as-intended in war-situations, and flounder on the full employment issue, the part of the theory everyone cared about, in times of peace. So, the valuable contribution of Keynesianism is that we've learned to avoid it.
Yes.
I also respect Ted Bundy so take that for what you will.
^There's someone here who has Ted Bundy as their profile pic lol. On that note, I respect Ed Gein for inspiring spawn dozens of horror movies (including some of my favorites like Psycho).
Freedom has always been the only route to progress.
Conza88, you don't need to care.
As a successful witch doctor.
I believe he had very original, heterodox thinking that demonstrated an exceptional intelligence; his knack for creative writing was combined with a sincere insistence that economic theorizing insist upon human welfare. Furthermore, I believe his demand-side economics (e.g., consumption as the motor of an economy, etc.) were ideas that deserved exploration, strengthening even opposing camps. Additionally, his persistent claim that human psychology (i.e., the nature of animals who must act) can lead to widespread coordination failures still seems to be an appropriate avenue for research.
Keynes was a man of very dubious character, such that even Keynesians thought so. Norman Macrae, one of the major contributors to The Economist, once expressed some thinly veiled disgust at Keynes' misogynistic chauvinism and his low opinion of woman and married life.
He wasn't really an economist, so much as a government bureaucrat who did philosophy in college.
Even if you never agreed with Milton Friedman on major issues, you could still think that the charming old egalitarian statist was a good wonderful man. Same with the very nice and decent Greg Mankiw. Another really nice guy is Paul Krugman. Samuelson was supposed to be okay, but an article by Subramaniam Swamy once told of how he corrected a small mistake Samuelson made on the board, and how it briefly seemed to show a flare of anger in him, which he managed to suppress.
John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith were two not very inspiring role models. Both were better than Thomas Malthus.
StrangeLoop: I believe he had very original, heterodox thinking that demonstrated an exceptional intelligence; his knack for creative writing was combined with a sincere insistence that economic theorizing insist upon human welfare. Furthermore, I believe his demand-side economics (e.g., consumption as the motor of an economy, etc.) were ideas that deserved exploration, strengthening even opposing camps. Additionally, his persistent claim that human psychology (i.e., the nature of animals who must act) can lead to widespread coordination failures still seems to be an appropriate avenue for research. A few problems with this: (1) his 'heterodox thinking' wasn't that new. (2) He always write relatively clear until the general theory. One wonders wether this was deliberate. (3) His 'consumption as the motor of the economy' was a fallacy long refuted. (4) His theories on money and business cycles were already refuted by Mises; a book he reviewed, but failed to grasp. (5) He taught he could write economics, after he only took 1 class... (6) He never bothered to grasp the economics profession as a whole; he just criticized straw mans. (7) He's claim on 'animal spirits' is anti-economics and means that he didn't grasp the economics profession at that time. Nobody said that we were always rational or whatever. Even more; his 'animal spirits' couldn't explain business cycles, because he had to explain why this was caused, why this was widespread and why it had the effects it did. According to these standards; we could also find reasons to respect Adolf Hitler as a man, thinker and economist. The state is not the enemy. The idea of the state is. | Post Points: 5
I do not. I respect people who I believe are sincere and thoughtful about their sciences, and Keynes wasn't one of them. There are plenty of respectable Keynesians, but I have to agree with Beatrice Webb: "Keynes is not serious about economic problems; he plays a game of chess with it [sic] in his leisure hours. The only serious cult with him is aesthetics."
My personal Anarcho-Capitalist flag. The symbol in the center stands for "harmony" and "protection"-- I'm hoping to illustrate the bond between order/justice and anarchy.
QFT
I'm all for exploring heterdox theories, no matter how heretical they may be, but the standard I hold them to is that they be logical, persuasive and grounded in human experience and accessible to human comprehension. A theory that leaves me more confused about something than when I started is useless. It could be that I'm just "not smart enough" to understand the theory, but I doubt it. If I can comprehend partial differential equations, algorithmic information theory, relativistic physics and quantum mechanics*, then a few algebraic formulas that are supposed to express relationships between economic variables is hardly an obstacle to comprehension. There is this snide insinuation that Austrian opponents of Keynesianism just don't understand math well enough to "get it" and that's why they ignorantly dismiss Keynes' "brilliant" theories. Well, I'm much more adept at mathematics than Austrian economics and I can't see any other function to the mathematical formulas unique to Keynesianism than obfuscation.
And there are very serious philosophical problems with blithely applying mathematical methods to economic problems. Abstract mathematics, like number theory or calculus, work because the objects of analysis are abstractions and have exactly and only the properties we assign to them. The widespread application of mathematics to the physical world, except for geometry and basic arithmetic, was very counter-intuitive and remained a serious obstacle to the progress of physics until about the last 1,000 years. The physical world doesn't seem to have a hidden mathematician continually cranking out arithmetic solutions to "laws of physics" so there doesn't seem to be any reason why the physical world should act mathematically. Fortunately for us, it turns out that the physical world does behave mathematically (something that still remains unexplained, by the way). But in order to apply mathematical constructs to modelling the physical world, we have to lay down the assumptions we're making about the physical world and the conditions under which those assumptions are broken and, therefore, our mathematical models do not apply. Our models are slaves to the data and the moment the data breaks our models, we have to throw them out and abstract the physical world in a new way. The problem with bad mathematical models is usually not so much that they are wrong as it is that they don't account for the real complexity of the physical world. That is, our models tend to be "true all of the time" until we find a corner-case that breaks the assumptions of the model, in which case it becomes only "true most of the time, except in this, that and the other cases." The rise and fall of Newtonian physics is a great example of this process.
Keynes, as far as I can tell, never bothered himself about any of this. The idea that human beings are complex and behave in arbitrarily complex ways is no obstacle for his classical mathematical models. The "MONIAC" or Phillips machine is an example of this sort of glib application of classical mathematics to complex systems. Keynesian models make assumptions about human behavior that are obviously wrong. Money does not flow like water molecules. Humans do not neatly divide into laborers and employers.
Clayton -
*I'm by no means an expert in any of these areas but I understand the basic gist of them and understand their founding theories, historical motivation, and so on.
Praising Keynes is like praising the worst kid on a house league team that kicked the ball without missing it a few times during the season. If you had consulted janitors and chimney sweeps you probably would gotten better economics. But you can't hold his popularity against him. It's the coach and league that gave that kid MVP.
Keynes was a very intelligent man. See, for instance, his work on probability. Honestly, he was a below average economist that happened to say what many others wanted to hear at the time.
I believe he had very original, heterodox thinking that demonstrated an exceptional intelligence
As far as I know, everything in the GT was already said by others (many of his ideas were around before Adam Smith's WON), usually less confusingly. What do you have in mind?
Furthermore, I believe his demand-side economics (e.g., consumption as the motor of an economy, etc.) were ideas that deserved exploration, strengthening even opposing camps.
Those ideas had been explored by the mercantalists and refuted by the classical economists.
Additionally, his persistent claim that human psychology (i.e., the nature of animals who must act) can lead to widespread coordination failures still seems to be an appropriate avenue for research.
How are "animal spirits" anything but a black box, which he uses to make ad hoc adjustments to allow his theory to escape refutation?
"I cannot prove, but am prepared to affirm, that if you take care of clarity in reasoning, most good causes will take care of themselves, while some bad ones are taken care of as a matter of course." -Anthony de Jasay