Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes - Rilegato

Backhouse, Roger; Bateman, Bradley W.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0674057759 ISBN 13: 9780674057753

Casa editrice: Harvard Univ Pr, 2011

Riassunto

The Great Recession of 2008 restored John Maynard Keynes to prominence. After decades when the Keynesian revolution seemed to have been forgotten, the great British theorist was suddenly everywhere. The New York Times asked, “What would Keynes have done?” The Financial Times wrote of “the undeniable shift to Keynes.” Le Monde pronounced the economic collapse Keynes’s “revenge.” Two years later, following bank bailouts and Tea Party fundamentalism, Keynesian principles once again seemed misguided or irrelevant to a public focused on ballooning budget deficits. In this readable account, Backhouse and Bateman elaborate the misinformation and caricature that have led to Keynes’s repeated resurrection and interment since his death in 1946.

Keynes’s engagement with social and moral philosophy and his membership in the Bloomsbury Group of artists and writers helped to shape his manner of theorizing. Though trained as a mathematician, he designed models based on how specific kinds of people (such as investors and consumers) actually behave—an approach that runs counter to the idealized agents favored by economists at the end of the century.

Keynes wanted to create a revolution in the way the world thought about economic problems, but he was more open-minded about capitalism than is commonly believed. He saw capitalism as essential to a society’s well-being but also morally flawed, and he sought a corrective for its main defect: the failure to stabilize investment. Keynes’s nuanced views, the authors suggest, offer an alternative to the polarized rhetoric often evoked by the word “capitalism” in today’s political debates.

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Recensione:

"[A] timely and provocative reappraisal." -- John Cassidy, New Yorker, 10th October 2011

"From Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes, the great economists of the past saw economics as a historical, philosophical and, above all, moral discipline...The first step to good capitalism, therefore, is to re-moralize economics. In their tantalizingly brief but thought-provoking study of Keynes, Roger E. Backhouse and Bradley W. Bateman have started to do just that. Keynes, they show, was much more than an astonishingly innovative economic theorist and accomplished man of affairs. He was also a moral philosopher...He abhorred the utilitarian would world view that lay at the heart of classical economic theory. The fundamental utilitarian dogma--that markets are driven by rational, individual utility maximizers--seemed to him morally repulsive as well as factually incorrect. He thought that capitalism was the least bad economic system available but he also thought it was morally defective. " --David Marquand, New Statesman 19th February 2012

L'autore:

Roger E. Backhouse is Professor of the History and Philosophy of Economics at the University of Birmingham. Bradley Bateman is Provost and Professor of Economics, Denison University.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Harvard Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0674057759
• ISBN 13: 9780674057753
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 197