Skidelsky tells us, Keynes was also practical, absorbed in questions of economic policy, argumentative, benevolent and intolerant, often rude, and had an intellectual arrogance that would allow positions previously held with great passion to be calmly abandoned. Well, that is exactly what the Cambridge faculty was like in the 1960s. Not only did the ghost of Keynes dominate the content of economics education at Cambridge, it also dominated the style. That style could be sustained with substance only by the extraordinarily gifted. So it is not surprising that the Cambridge faculty, although still very "Keynesian," looks much more conventional these days.
John Eatwell, Baron EatwellRelated topics
arrogance content conventional dominate economics education faculty ghost great hold intellectual intolerant passion policy practical style substance surprising well 1960s keynes keynesian days cambridge looks questionsRelated quotes
These ideas have implications not only for theoretical and econometric practices but also for the ways in which policymakers and their advisers think about the choices confronting them. In particular, the rational expectations approach directs attention away from particular isolated actions and toward choices among feasible rules of the game, or repeated strategies for choosing policy variables. While Keynesian and monetarists macroeconomic models have been used to try to analyze what the effects of isolated actions would be, it is now clear that the answers they have given have necessarily been bad, if only because such questions are ill-posed.
Thomas J. Sargent
Doubts about the existence of free will and individuals are nothing new, of course. More than 2,000 years ago thinkers in India, China and Greece argued that ‘the individual self is an illusion'. Yet such doubts don't really change history much unless they have a practical impact on economics, politics and day-to-day life. Humans are masters of cognitive dissonance, and we allow ourselves to believe one thing in the laboratory and an altogether different thing in the courthouse or in parliament. Just as Christianity didn't disappear the day Darwin published On the Origin of Species, so liberalism won't vanish just because scientists have reached the conclusion that there are no free individuals.
Yuval Noah Harari
Why are ecologists and environmentalists so feared and hated? This is because in part what they have to say is new to the general public, and the new is always alarming. Moreover, the practical recommendations deduced from ecological principles threaten the vested interests of commerce; it is hardly surprising that the financial and political power created by these investments should be used sometimes to suppress environmental impact studies. However, I think the major opposition to ecology has deeper roots than mere economics; ecology threatens widely held values so fundamental that they must be called religious. An attack on values is inevitably seen as an act of subversion.
Garrett Hardin
I was studying agriculture, how to produce better chickens, better cattle, better horses - horses in those days - better fruit, better vegetables. This was in the early years of the Great Depression, and the thoughts crossed my mind that there wasn't a hell of a lot of use producing better crops and better livestock if you couldn't sell them, that the real problem of agriculture was not efficiency in production but the problem of whether you could make money after you produced the stuff. So I shifted from the technical side to, first, the study of agricultural economic issues and then on to economics itself.
John Kenneth Galbraith
A fairly large part, if not, indeed, the very nucleus, of the Fascist movement has been built up of ex-Socialists who abandoned their party because of, or in consequence of, the war. This observation is particularly true of the younger element in the Socialistic party, including young men of a practical turn, often restless in temperament, who had rallied to the Socialist party not so much because of its positive economic program, as because of its negative program of protest against the aimless individualism of the Liberal regime, and who found in Fascism the means for effectuating their desire to take a part and to reconstruct.
Corrado Gini
