Keynes Hayek The Clash that Defined Modern Economics

by Wapshott, Nicholas

• ISBN13: 9780393077483
• ISBN10: 0393077489
• Edition: 00
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-10-11
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Summary

As the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the world into turmoil, two men emerged with competing claims on how to restore balance to economies gone awry. John Maynard Keynes, the mercurial Cambridge economist, believed that government had a duty to spend when others would not. He met his opposite in a little-known Austrian economics professor, Freidrich Hayek, who considered attempts to intervene both pointless and potentially dangerous. The battle lines thus drawn, Keynesian economics would dominate for decades and coincide with an era of unprecedented prosperity, but conservative economists and political leaders would eventually embrace and execute Hayek's contrary vision. From their first face-to-face encounter to the heated arguments between their ardent disciples, Nicholas Wapshott here unearths the contemporary relevance of Keynes and Hayek, as present-day arguments over the virtues of the free market and government intervention rage with the same ferocity as they did in the 1930s.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
The Glamorous Hero: How Keynes Became Hayek's Idol, 1919ù27	p. 1
End of Empire: Hayek Experiences Hyperinflation Firsthand, 1919-24	p. 15
The Battle Lines Are Drawn: Keynes Denies the "Naturalö Order of Economics, 1923-29	p. 29
Stanley and Livingstone: Keynes and Hayek Meet far the First Time, 1928-30	p. 46
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: Hayek Harshly Reviews Keynes's Treatise, 1931	p. 65
Pistols at Dawn: Hayek Harshly Reviews Keynes's Treatise, 1931	p. 81
Return Fire: Keynes and Hayek Lock Horns, 1931	p. 95
The Italian Job: Keynes Asks Piero Sraffa to Continue the Debate, 1932	p. 110
Toward The General Theory: The Cost-Free Cure for Unemployment, 1932ù33	p. 123
Hayek Blinks: The General Theory Invites a Response, 1932ù36	p. 138
Keynes Takes America: Roosevelt and the Young New Deal Economists, 1936	p. 154
Hopelessly Stuck in Chapter 6: Hayek Writes His Own "General Theory," 1936ù41	p. 171
The Road to Nowhere: Hayek Links Keynes's Remedies to Tyranny, 1937ù46	p. 188
The Wilderness Years: Mont-Pèlerin and Hayek's Move to Chicago, 1944ù69	p. 207
The Age of Keynes: Three Decades of Unrivalled American Prosperity, 1946-80	p. 226
Hayek's Counterrevolution: Friedman, Coldwater, Thatcher, and Reagan 1963-88	p. 247
The Battle Resumed: Freshwater and Saltwater Economists, 1989-2008	p. 266
And the Winner Is ...: Avoiding the Great Recession, 2008 Onward	p. 285
Acknowledgments	p. 297
Notes	p. 299
Selected Bibliography	p. 347
Index	p. 357
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