There is a provocative piece in the weekend Lunch with FT featuring Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky. Some highlights:
On economists
“…there is an imperial benevolence about them; they are not interested in people, they are very impersonal. I cannot imagine having a bosom friend who is an economist.”
On Keynes’ writing
“He was a wonderful writer on economics, the best there has ever been. Some people say a better writer than a thinker. Wrong. He used a rhetorical logic, à la Aristotle.”
On over-thinking things
“I am not a calculating person. That is why I like Keynes, who said, ‘If the barometer is high and the clouds are black, don’t waste time on a debate on whether to take an umbrella.’”
On laying blame for the crisis
He blames [economists’ quantitative preoccupations] mindset on the revival of anti-Keynesianism in the 1970s when government intervention in the economy made way for supply-side theory of tax cuts and labour market deregulation. But Keynesians, too, were guilty of overreaching: they assumed the state was capable of fine-tuning demand to mitigate the effects of the economic cycle.
Skidelsky’s update to his excellent Keynes biography is called Keynes: Return of the Master. It will be out September 15th.
[via FT]
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