The Big Question: Who was JM Keynes, and does he offer answers to the economic crisis?
Why are we asking this now? For decades, undiluted Keynesian economic policies have been dismissed as irrelevant: right for their time, perhaps, but outdated by subsequent changes in the economy. But it looks as if things are changing. In the face of the current financial crisis, government after government has moved towards more Keynesian solutions to economic problems. The UK is among them. Alistair Darling recently declared that “much of what Keynes wrote still makes a lot of sense”; yesterday, in a speech on economic policy, Gordon Brown declared that it was responsible to boost spending with the aim of speeding up economic activity, even if borrowing had to increase to do so. John Maynard Keynes once said that “in the long run, we are all dead”; more than 60 years after his own passing, though, his ideas seem to have come back to life.
