Adam Tooze: Keynes and the Calculations of Liberalism: "We were once again living through a profound crisis of the liberal order.... I had Keynes on my mind and the thinker of liberal reconstruction... seemed in many ways more relevant than ever. This led me to put together a slide pack of notes on Keynes’s collection Essays in Persuasion (1931)...
...The slide pack is long, but the Keynes material is worth the effort!... The key to understanding Keynes’s politics is... the boundary between politics and the economy fluid.... In Keynesianism their manipulation becomes the key variable in liberalism’s updated repertoire of politics and government.... [In] the crisis of 2008... not only monetary and fiscal policy, but also a dramatic extension of the macroprudential regime in the name of financial stability.... Wherever there were activist central banks and an ability to withstand a currency devaluation the bond vigilantes were held at bay.... As Keynes said the key is to keep “minds flexible” and to push the argument in “detail”...
#shouldread
