“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist”*…
The tenth anniversary of the start of the Great Recession was the occasion for an elegant essay by the Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman, who noted how little the debate about the causes and consequences of the crisis have changed over the last decade. Whereas the Great Depression of the 1930s produced Keynesian economics, and the stagflation of the 1970s produced Milton Friedman’s monetarism, the Great Recession has produced no similar intellectual shift…
Robert Skidelsky explains why at: “How Economics Survived the Economic Crisis.”
* John Maynard Keynes
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As we delve into the dismal, we might spare a thought for Robert Burton; he died on this date in 1640. An Oxford scholar, he is best known for his classic The Anatomy of Melancholy, an odd mix of wide-ranging scholarship, humor, linguistic skill, and creative (if highly approximate) insights– a favorite of scholars and authors from Samuel Johnson to Anthony Burgess.
