Product Description

In the current financial crisis Keynes has been taken out of his cupboard, dusted down, consulted, cited, invoked and appealed to about why events have taken the course they have and how a rescue operation can be effected. Why have we gone back so emphatically to the ideas of an economist who died fifty years ago? There are three main ideas of Keynes' worth thinking about now. The first is that the future is unknowable, and therefore that economic storms, especially those originating in the financial system, are not random shocks which impinge on smoothly-adjusting markets, but part of the normal working of the market system. The second idea is that economies wounded by these 'shocks' can, if left to themselves, stay in a depressed condition for a long time. That is why governments need to have and use fiscal ammunition to prevent a slide from financial crisis to economic depression. The third concerns what he termed 'organicism': societies are communities not, as he put it, 'branches of the multiplication table'. This limited his support for the pursuit of efficiency at all costs. The ideas of John Maynard Keynes have never been more timely.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7791 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

About the Author
Robert Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick. His three volume biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes (1983, 1992, 2000) received numerous prizes, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations. ('This three-volume life of the British economist should be given a Nobel Prize for History if there was such a thing' - Norman Stone.) He is the author of the The World After Communism (1995). He was made a life peer in 1991, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1994.

Customer Reviews

Keynes to the rescue,again.
Brilliant look at what's gone wrong from a Keynesian prospective and what can be done.Well written and thought provoking. Even I could understand some of the economic stuff. Shows how little economics and politics has progressed since the 40's.Its still all about greed and gullibility.I must get his biography of Keynes now.

An important update
If anyone ever 'got' economics it was certainly Keynes, and if anyone 'gets' Keynes it is Skidelsky. Description of The Global Economic Crisis is a bit old-hat by now, so the start of the book drags very, very slightly, but as the critique develops and moves into proper exploration of 'The Master's' ideas in the post-crisis arena - with a good bit of banker-bashing too boot - the book comes into its own.

Not too technical, as has been suggested elsewhere. Indeed, Skidelsky is no mathematician, which is to the great benefit of the readability of his latest work.

Back in Vogue
With Keynes back in vogue after a lull in his reputation in the seventies it's good to have an overview of what he was about. An economist himself and having written probably the definitive biography of the man, Robert Skidelsky is idealy placed to do this task.

He begins looking into the current economic situation and higlights areas of economic thinking since that are, in part, responsible. This he relates to Keynes because some of the errors in thinking are the very same that Keynes was warning about in the nineteen thirties. Especially singled out are ideas that economic events can be predicted, and that markets are always self-correcting.

Skidelsky, however, goes deeper than most economic text books. He points out that Keynes was a thinker about uncertainty and risk. He also looks at Keynes as a moralist an political thinker and how he regarded economics as a means to ensure a better life for people. He also looks at the success, or otherwise, of post-war Keynsian economic policies and how relavant Keynes is to today, though stops short of asking what the master would have said about the current situation.

All in all this book does the reader a service in showing what Keynes was about. This is especially valuable as his works are generally not easily available to the general public. Because he thought so wide, perhaps there is a call for a "Keynes reader" as is available for many other great thinkers. This would make for a great follow-up to this. Skidelsky would be the ideal editor for this. In the meantime, this volume will more than do.