Robert Skidelsky on Keynes’s General Theory at 80
“Two final
reflections suggest a renewed, if more modest, role for Keynesian economics. An
even bigger shock to the pre-2008 orthodoxy than the collapse itself was the
revelation of the corrupt power of the financial system and the extent to which
post-crash governments had allowed their policies to be scripted by the
bankers. To control financial markets in the interests of full employment and
social justice lies squarely in the Keynesian tradition.
Second, for new
generations of students, Keynes’s relevance may lie less in his specific
remedies for unemployment than in his criticism of his profession for modeling
on the basis of unreal assumptions. Students of economics eager to escape from
the skeletal world of optimizing agents into one of fully-rounded humans, set
in their histories, cultures, and institutions will find Keynes’s economics
inherently sympathetic. That is why I expect Keynes to be a living presence 20
years from now, on the centenary of the General Theory, and well beyond.”