Joseph Schumpeter on the Ricardian and Keynesian vices. The echo of bdsm practices—le vice anglais—that you hear is intentional on Schumpeter's part, as is his feminization of Keynesians, and the misogyny. Schumpeter was a very smart but very interesting man: Joseph Schumpeter (1953): History of Economic Analysis https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1134838700: "Ricardo’s… interest was in the clear-cut result of direct, practical significance. In order to get this he... piled one simplifying assumption upon another until... the desire results emerged almost as tautologies... It is an excellent theory that can never be refuted and lacks nothing save sense. The habit of applying results of this character to the solution of practical problems we shall call the Ricardian Vice...
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[Keynes] rendered a decisive service to equalitarianism in an all-important point. Economists with an equalitarian bent had long before learned to discount all other aspects or functions of inequality of income except one: like J.S .Mill they had retained scruples concerning the effects of equalitarian policies upon saving. Keynes freed them from these scruples. His analysis seemed to restore intellectual respectability to anti-saving views; and he spelled out the implications of this in Chapter 24 of the General Theory. Thus, though his scientific message appealed to many of the best minds of the economic profession, it also appealed to the writers and talkers on the fringes of professional economics who gleaned nothing from the General Theory except the New Economics of Spending and for whom he brought back the happy times of Mrs. Marcet (see Part III, ch. 4) when every schoolgirl, by learning the use of a few simple concepts, acquired competence to judge of all the ins and outs of the infinitely complex organism of capitalist society.
Keynes was Ricardo’s peer in the highest sense of the phrase. But he was Ricardo’s peer also in that his work is a striking example of what we have called above the Ricardian Vice, namely, the habit of piling a heavy load of practical conclusions upon a tenuous groundwork, which was unequal to it yet seemed in its simplicity not only attractive but also convincing. All this goes a long way though not the whole way toward answering the questions that always interest us, namely, the questions what it is in a man’s message that makes people listen to him, and why and how...
#shouldread #books #schumpeter #keynes #economicsgoneright #economicsgonewrong #historyofeconomicthought
