What role should money and government really play in economic life — and has mainstream economics been getting the answer badly wrong? In this important book, Robert Skidelsky argues that the omnipresence of uncertainty makes both money and government essential features of any functioning market economy. We need money partly because the future is unknowable; and good government, by making the future more predictable, reduces that very demand. These are not peripheral concerns — they are, Skidelsky contends, the central drama of economics itself.
The book traces how economic orthodoxy, following Adam Smith, persistently championed non-intervention — until the Great Depression of 1929–32 forced a reckoning. Out of the precarious balance between government, employers and trade unions, Keynesian economics emerged as the dominant policy paradigm of the Western world. Yet the stagflation of the 1970s brought about its rejection and a return to small-state neoclassical thinking. When the global financial crash of 2008 struck with devastating force, it seemed certain to dislodge this revamped orthodoxy — but, curiously, it did not. Keynesian emergency measures contained the crisis, only for the pre-crash consensus to be reinstated, undermined but unbowed. In the years since, no compelling new idea has taken hold, and austerity agendas have left the global economy still fragile and anaemic.
‘In this remarkable work, Robert Skidelsky unites his experience, knowledge and talents in a sweeping account of money and power’ James K. Galbraith
Skidelsky’s aim is both clarifying and galvanising: by familiarising readers with the essential elements of Keynes’s thinking and exposing how much of economic orthodoxy falls short of the hard science it claims to be, the book seeks to embolden the next generation of economists to break free from their conceptual constraints — and to restore money and government to the starring roles in economic life that they have always deserved.
ISBN 13: 9780141988610
Author: Robert Skidelsky
