The Newyork Times

PAUL KRUGMAN
May 3, 2011, 9:34 am
In The Long Run, Keynes Is Dead
Commenter Greg has a good point on my Keynes post:

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Keynes is dead. It doesn’t matter what he advocates. We’re left with a set of ideas he provided, and the decades of analysis that have been applied to them since. The ideas are good, or bad, or meaningless, but the man himself is no longer relevant. It’s also not necessary to take all of his thoughts en-masse– if the same man gave us a clearer understanding of Economics and spent his weekends drowning puppies, we can very well take the economic insights while foregoing the puppy drowning.

Let me hasten to add that I am not now, and have never been, a puppy-drowner.

I do think it’s useful to read Keynes. But Greg is right: modern Keynesianism is to be understood through the views of modern Keynesians, not by hunting through the original works for hidden meanings.

And modern Keynesians are emphatically not advocates of central planning. Let me quote myself:
The brand of economics I use in my daily work – the brand that I still consider by far the most reasonable approach out there – was largely established by Paul Samuelson back in 1948, when he published the first edition of his classic textbook. It’s an approach that combines the grand tradition of microeconomics, with its emphasis on how the invisible hand leads to generally desirable outcomes, with Keynesian macroeconomics, which emphasizes the way the economy can develop magneto trouble, requiring policy intervention. In the Samuelsonian synthesis, one must count on the government to ensure more or less full employment; only once that can be taken as given do the usual virtues of free markets come to the fore.

To pretend that this amounts to an advocacy of Soviet-style planning — as some conservatives do — is to duck the real issues.