• Complain

Nicholas Wapshott - Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics

Here you can read online Nicholas Wapshott - Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2012, publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, genre: Politics. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Nicholas Wapshott Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics
  • Book:
    Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    W. W. Norton & Company
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2012
  • Rating:
    5 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 100
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

I defy anybodyKeynesian, Hayekian, or uncommittedto read [Wapshotts] work and not learn something new.John Cassidy, The New Yorker

As the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the world into turmoil, two men emerged with competing claims on how to restore balance to economies gone awry. John Maynard Keynes, the mercurial Cambridge economist, believed that government had a duty to spend when others would not. He met his opposite in a little-known Austrian economics professor, Freidrich Hayek, who considered attempts to intervene both pointless and potentially dangerous. The battle lines thus drawn, Keynesian economics would dominate for decades and coincide with an era of unprecedented prosperity, but conservative economists and political leaders would eventually embrace and execute Hayeks contrary vision.
From their first face-to-face encounter to the heated arguments between their ardent disciples, Nicholas Wapshott here unearths the contemporary relevance of Keynes and Hayek, as present-day arguments over the virtues of the free market and government intervention rage with the same ferocity as they did in the 1930s.

Nicholas Wapshott: author's other books


Who wrote Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

ALSO BY NICHOLAS WAPSHOTT

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher:
A Political Marriage (2007)

Older: The Biography of George Michael with Timothy Wapshott (1998)

Carol Reed: A Biography (1994)

Rex Harrison (1991)

The Man Between: A Biography of Carol Reed (1990, in United Kingdom)

Thatcher with George Brock (1983)

Peter OToole: A Biography (1981; in
United Kingdom, 1983)

KEYNES

HAYEK Nicholas Wapshott W W NORTON COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON T O A NTHONY H - photo 1

HAYEK

Nicholas Wapshott

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

NEW YORK LONDON

T O A NTHONY H OWARD

CONTENTS

PREFACE

It was, perhaps, the most unusual episode in the long-running duel between the two giants of twentieth-century economic thought. During World War II, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek spent all night together, alone, on the roof of the chapel of Kings College, Cambridge. Their task was to gaze at the skies and watch for German bombers aiming to pour incendiary bombs on the small picturesque cities of England.

In the spring and summer of 1942, in retaliation against British bombing of the medieval cities Lbeck, which sheltered a U-boat lair, and Rostock, home to the Heinkel bomber works, German planes bombed a string of English cities that held no strategic value. Exeter, Bath, and York endured flamestorms that put their ancient buildings at risk. The British headline writers came up with the phrase The Baedeker Blitz because it seemed the Luftwaffe planners were selecting British targets by consulting the German guidebook that rated cities according to their cultural worth. Though Cambridge held few important war industries, it warranted its place on the Nazi menu of devastation for its collegiate university founded in the Middle Ages.

Night after night the faculty and students of Kings, armed with shovels, took turns to man the roof of the ornate Gothic chapel, whose foundation stone was laid by Henry VI in 1441. The fire watchmen of St. Pauls Cathedral in London had discovered that there was no recourse against an exploding bomb, but if an incendiary could be tipped over the edge of the parapet before it set fire to the roof, damage could be kept to a minimum. And so Keynes, just short of sixty years old, and Hayek, age forty-one, sat and waited for the impending German onslaught, their shovels propped against the limestone balustrade. They were joined by a common fear that they would not emerge brave or nimble enough to save their venerable stone charge.

It was particularly fitting that the two economists should defy the Nazi peril, for both, in different ways, had foreseen the coming of the national socialist tyranny and presaged the rise of Hitler. Keynes was a young economic don at Kings when, at the outbreak of World War I, he was recruited by the Treasury, the British finance ministry, to raise money from Wall Street to finance the Allies efforts. Once the war was brought to an end in 1918, Keynes was kept on to advise how best to squeeze reparations from the defeated Germans.

What Keynes found at the peace talks in Paris shocked him. While the victorious Allied leaders, sparked by vengeance, relished the misery they hoped to inflict on the German nation by severe financial penalties, Keynes saw the issue in a quite different light. He believed that to deliberately beggar a modern trading nation like Germany was to impose crippling poverty on its citizens, which would provide the conditions for extreme politics, insurrection, even revolution. Rather than bringing a just end to World War I, Keynes thought the Treaty of Versailles was planting the seeds of World War II. Back home, he penned The Economic Consequences of the Peace , a devastating indictment of the folly of the Allied leaders. The book was a best seller worldwide and propelled Keynes into the international limelight as an economist with the common touch.

Keyness caustic eloquence was not lost on Hayek, a young soldier in the Austrian army on the Italian front who returned to find his home city of Vienna devastated and its peoples confidence broken. Hayek and his family suffered from the precipitous inflation that soon beset the Austrian economy. He saw his parents savings melt away, an experience that was to permanently harden him against those who advocated inflation as a cure for a broken economy. He was determined to prove that there were no simple solutions to intractable economic problems, and came to believe that those who advocated large-scale public spending programs to cure unemployment were inviting not just uncontrollable inflation but political tyranny.

Although both Keynes and Hayek agreed on the shortcomings of the Versailles peace treaty, they went on to spend most of the 1930s arguing over the future of economics. Before long, their disagreement included the role of government itself and the threat to individual liberties of intervening in the market. The debate was heated and ill-mannered and took on the spirit of a religious feud. When the 1929 stock market crash triggered the Great Depression, the two men provided competing claims on how best to restore health to the shattered world economy. Though the pair eventually agreed to disagree, their ardent disciples continued the fierce battle long after the two men died.

In September 2008, another Wall Street crash took place and another world financial crisis erupted. President George W. Bush, an ostensible adherent of Hayeks views on the sanctity of the free market, was faced with a stark choice: to watch while the market came to rest with a depression that might rival the one of nearly eighty years before, or to speedily adopt Keynesian remedies to spend trillions of borrowed government dollars to save the sinking economy from more harm. So alarming was the prospect of letting the free market do its worst that, with barely a second thought, Bush abandoned Hayek and embraced Keynes. The election of a new president, Barack Obama, oversaw further vast injections of borrowed money into the economy. But before the stimulus funds were fully spent, there was a violent popular reaction against incurring such unprecedented levels of public debt. The Tea Party movement rose to demand that the administration change its course. Hank, the American people dont like bailouts, Tea Party champion Sarah Palin scolded Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in October 2008. Glenn Beck, the political commentator, revived the reputation of Hayek by drawing the attention of Americans to his neglected Road to Serfdom , and the long-forgotten Austrian rose to the top of the book sales charts. Keynes was now out and Hayek in.

Arguments over the competing claims to virtue of the free market and government intervention now rage as fiercely as they did in the 1930s. So who was right, Keynes or Hayek? This book is an attempt to answer the question that has divided economists and politicians for eighty years and to show that the stark differences between two exceptional men continue to mark the great divide between the ideas of liberals and conservatives to this day.

ONE

The Glamorous Hero

How Keynes Became Hayeks Idol, 191927

The greatest debate in the history of economics began with a simple request for a book. In the early weeks of 1927, Friedrich Hayek, a young Viennese economist, wrote to John Maynard Keynes at Kings College, Cambridge, in England, asking for an economic textbook written fifty years before, Francis Ysidro Edgeworths exotically titled Mathematical Psychics . Keynes replied with a single line on a plain postcard: I am sorry to say that my stock of Mathematical Psychics is exhausted.

Why did Hayek, an unknown economist with little experience, approach of all people Keynes, perhaps the best-known economist in the world? For Keynes, Hayeks request was just another item in his bulging postbag. Cambridges economics prodigy retained no record of Hayeks request, though he was so conscious of the contribution he was making to posterity through his daring approach to the study of political economy that he had taken to hoarding each scribbled note and every last letter. His posthumously published papers, even when edited, fill thirteen volumes. Hayek, meanwhile, at the time seemed fully aware of the significance of his request. He treasured Keyness bald reply and preserved it for the next sixty-five years as a personal memento and professional trophy. The postcard sits today in the Hayek archive at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, California, tangible evidence that Hayek had instigated the first contact in what would become an intense duel over the role of government in society and the fate of the world economy.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics»

Look at similar books to Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics»

Discussion, reviews of the book Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.