Professor Tony Aspromourgos: The General Theory After 75 Years
Date
From: Wednesday December 7, 2011, 12:00 pm
To: Wednesday December 7, 2011, 2:00 pm
On Wednesday 7 December, Professor Tony Aspromourgos presented his paper: The General Theory After 75 Years: Keynes's Policy versus 'Keynesian' Policy. The paper is available here (PDF).
The Great Financial Crisis led to a revival of interest in ‘Keynesian’ economic policy, understood as temporary, debt-financed fiscal activism in response to a short-run, albeit particularly deep, macroeconomic contraction. But Keynes’s theory led him to diagnose involuntary unemployment as a long-run problem, and one for which competition (via wage and price flexibility) was not a solution. Consequently, his policy proposals were more far-reaching than short-run fiscal activism. The final chapter of the General Theory provides the appropriate point of departure for reflecting on the difference between Keynes’s policy position and what later came to be regarded as Keynesian policy.
Tony Aspromourgos is Professor of Economics in the University of Sydney. His recent publications include The Science of Wealth: Adam Smith and the Framing of Political Economy (Routledge, 2009) and "Public Debt Sustainability and Alternative Theories of Interest", Cambridge Journal of Economics 2010 (with D. Rees and G. White). Professor Aspromourgos is Co-Editor of the History of Economics Review, a member of the Editorial Board of the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, and was this year elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.
Venue
RBA
65 Martin Place , Sydney NSW