The New Republic publica un artículode Robert Solow que es una reseña de: Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius By Sylvia Nasar, quien escribió el libro sobre una mente brillante, la vida de Nash. Es una pieza fabulosa para entender las aportaciones de importantes pensadores de la economía, pero sobre todo, la apreaciación de un grande, Solow, sobre otro grande, Keynes. Por ejemplo, Solow dice:
"But Keynes was also the creator of serious macroeconomics in 1936, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. He was not without antecedents, of course, but he provided the first workable intellectual apparatus for thinking about what determines the level of “output as a whole.” A generation of economists found his ideas the only available handle with which to grasp the events of the Great Depression of the time. The analytical issues here are inevitably more complicated and abstract than something like creative destruction..."
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"But Keynes was also the creator of serious macroeconomics in 1936, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. He was not without antecedents, of course, but he provided the first workable intellectual apparatus for thinking about what determines the level of “output as a whole.” A generation of economists found his ideas the only available handle with which to grasp the events of the Great Depression of the time. The analytical issues here are inevitably more complicated and abstract than something like creative destruction..."
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Lectura obligatoria
One reason why Keynes’s great book is so difficult to explain is that it is no masterpiece of clarity. There are still learned arguments about “what Keynes really meant.” I want to emphasize two of its themes, because they seem to be central to his place in the story of economic genius, and because they point directly to the reason why Keynesian economics, born in the 1930s, has become dramatically relevant again today. Back then, serious thinking about the general state of the economy was dominated by the notion that prices moved, market by market, to make supply equal to demand. Every act of production, anywhere, generates income and potential demand somewhere, and the price system would sort it all out so that supply and demand for every good would balance. Make no mistake: this is a very deep and valuable idea. Many excellent minds have worked to refine it. Much of the time it gives a good account of economic life. But Keynes saw that there would be occasions, in a complicated industrial capitalist economy, when this account of how things work would break down.
One reason why Keynes’s great book is so difficult to explain is that it is no masterpiece of clarity. There are still learned arguments about “what Keynes really meant.” I want to emphasize two of its themes, because they seem to be central to his place in the story of economic genius, and because they point directly to the reason why Keynesian economics, born in the 1930s, has become dramatically relevant again today. Back then, serious thinking about the general state of the economy was dominated by the notion that prices moved, market by market, to make supply equal to demand. Every act of production, anywhere, generates income and potential demand somewhere, and the price system would sort it all out so that supply and demand for every good would balance. Make no mistake: this is a very deep and valuable idea. Many excellent minds have worked to refine it. Much of the time it gives a good account of economic life. But Keynes saw that there would be occasions, in a complicated industrial capitalist economy, when this account of how things work would break down.
1 comentario:
Muy interesante, estas lecturas siempre me agradan; a los economistas nos sirve para recordar el por qué de las teorías y como reformularlas en el presente.
Gracias Dr. Villagómez
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