The Keynesian Revolution and Our Empty Economy: We’re All Dead
By Victor V. Claar and Greg Forster
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Pp. xvii, 345. $89 hardcover.
Is our economic system struggling on many dimensions? Is the practice of economics responsible for the problems in the economy? Can we identify the major cause of these problems? In a bold and provocative new book, Victor Claar and Greg Forster give a resounding “yes” to these questions, targeting John Maynard Keynes as the major culprit for our modern malaise.
The authors argue that we live in an age of anxiety, with no clear understanding of the people we are becoming. The modern economy excels at producing goods and services, but both the moral framework under which we operate and the discipline of economics have been badly distorted by Keynes’s influence. With such broad pronouncements about our world, one might expect a screed, a moral diatribe with little analysis. Such is not is a thoughtful, carefully argued intellectual history of modernity and of the generally accepted analytical tools used to describe and critique it.
