4 ms·
I've found two key ideas in Keynes: 1. Wealth is a verb, not a noun, at least at macroeconomic scales. The wealth of nations is measured by how much they do mo
by api 6y ago
I've found two key ideas in Keynes:
1. Wealth is a verb, not a noun, at least at macroeconomic scales. The wealth of nations is measured by how much they do more than how much they have.
2. Governments and perhaps other large entities should spend counter-cyclically. This makes sense in terms of dampening cycles but also in terms of getting the most value for that money. If you can spend during a recession, you get a bargain.
Keynes did not advocate unlimited money printing and he would be horrified by the sheer amount of debt in modern economies.
He was critical of hard gold pegs, but didn't necessarily advocate the perhaps equally insane opposite.
Also agree about Marx. His fans misunderstand him as much as his critics. What most people associate with Marx comes more from Lenin and Stalin.
I would add Ayn Rand to the list of totally misunderstood thinkers both by her fans and her critics. She was a heretical liberal humanist, not a conservative and definitely not a reactionary.
One curious thing I've noticed is that if you have a discussion between Marxists of the classical and less Leninist sort and Randians you will find huge areas of overlap outside economics. These include technology, the notion of progress, science, the importance of education, etc.
- opo 6y ago>... you have a discussion between Marxists of the classical and less Leninist sort and Randians you will find huge areas of overlap outside economics. These include technology, the notion of progress, science, the importance of education, etc. You can see that on a Pournelle chart of political ideology which maps ideology on a 2d graph instead of just a line. >...The x-axis, "Attitude toward the State" (labeled statism), refers to a political philosophy's attitude toward the state and centralized government. The farthest right is "state worship" and the farthest left represents the state as the "ultimate evil", preferring individual freedom. >...The y-axis, "Attitude toward planned social progress" (labeled rationalism), refers to the extent which a political philosophy is compatible with the idea that social problems can be solved by the use of reason. Ayn Rand and various Marxists would likely both score high on the rationalism scale (and be at close to opposite sides of the statism scale). (There might be many other multi-dimensional mappings that work better to map political ideology, but anything is likely better than the common practice of just mapping all ideology on a single line.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pournelle_chart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pournelle_chart