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  • Published: 19 November 2019
  • ISBN: 9780141988610
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 512
  • RRP: $26.99
Categories:

Money and Government

A Challenge to Mainstream Economics




A major challenge to economic orthodoxy, by one of Britain's leading historians and economists

The dominant view in economics is that money and government should play only a minor role in economic life. Money, it is claimed, is more than a medium of exchange; and economic outcomes are best left to the 'invisible hand' of the market. Tracing the establishment of this orthodoxy and the challenges posed to it since the Great Depression of 1929-32, Robert Skidelsky shows how - unlike then - the 2008 global financial has not led to any new policy paradigm. Once the crisis had been overcome - by Keynesian measures taken in desperation - the pre-crash orthodoxy was reinstated, undermined but unbowed. No new 'big idea' has emerged, and orthodoxy has maintained its sway, enacting punishing austerity agendas that leave us with a still-anaemic global economy.

This book aims to familiarise the reader with essential elements of Keynes's 'big idea'. By showing that much of economic orthodoxy is far from being the hard science it claims to be, it aims to embolden the next generation of economists to break free from their conceptual prisons and afford money and government the starring roles in the economic drama that they deserve.

  • Published: 19 November 2019
  • ISBN: 9780141988610
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 512
  • RRP: $26.99
Categories:

About the author

Robert Skidelsky

Robert Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Ecomony at Warwick University. His three-volume biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes (1983,1992, 2000) received numerous prizes, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations. He is the author of The World after Communism (1995) and Keynes: The Return of the Master (2009). He was made a life peer in 1991, is a member of the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1994.

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Praise for Money and Government

Skidelsky, historian and biographer of Keynes, is a major figure in the revival of Keynesian thought since the financial crisis. His aim in this ambitious new book is to argue that pervasive uncertainty, which Keynes emphasised in his seminal theory of the 1930s, explains why money and governments must be central players in any market economy.

Martin Wolf, Financial Times (Books of the Year)