The Keynesian Diversion
15th January 2011
Keynes was no brilliant economist, if indeed he can be said to have been an economist at all. He was instead a brilliant public intellectual who knew just enough economics to enable him to transform a decades- (centuries?-)old mistaken understanding of the economy held by business people into “the new economics.”
This mistaken understanding is an understandable result of being a businessperson: the greater is the demand for your product, the better is your business. And the better is your business, the more workers you hire and the more of other inputs you buy – thus making your suppliers’ business prospects better, too.
It’s easy to be a Keynesian – most business people are, and swarms of pseudo-economists long before Keynes were saying largely the same thing that Keynes himself said in 1936. It is, alas, far more difficult to be a real economist.