Lester Thurow

Lester Thurow most recent book, Dangerous Currents: The State of Economics, in Oxford’s ‘Library of Political Economy’ series, appears next month. He is a professor of economics and management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keynesianism in One Country

Lester Thurow, 1 September 1983

Godley and Cripps devote their first seven seven pages to acknowledging the storms that are raging around the subject of macroeconomics. Deteriorating economic performances, and monetarists, ‘converted’ governments ‘to the idea that it was impossible for them to control output and unemployment. All they could do, the new story went, was create conditions (including the elimination of inflation) in which enterprise could flourish.’ They then spend the next 284 pages building a formal algebraic macro-economic model that will sail out of the storms of intellectual confusion. Finally they reach the safety of a two-page epilogue: ‘Our claim,’ they say there, ‘is to have provided a framework for an orderly analysis of whole economic systems evolving through time.’ They continue:

Putting down

Emma Rothschild, 4 June 1981

Times are dire for economists in America. The country is preoccupied with its economic misfortunes. Yet the most esteemed theorist of economic recovery seems to be the early 19th-century French...

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