Covid Showed Us What Keynes Always Knew - Adam Tooze
How the pandemic and events of the last decade upended economic policy.
Ezra Klein
So you’ve written that one of the central takeaways of the last year and a half is that, quote, “John Maynard Keynes was right when he declared, during World War II, that anything we can actually do, we can afford.”
So if you have 100 jet planes that you can make, and you only have, quote unquote, “money” for 80 of them, the government can create the money for 100. But if you want 120 jet planes, and you can only make 100, then you can’t.
Adam Tooze
We’re in a gray zone. There’s no longer one best way. There’s no longer a Washington consensus that you can easily subscribe to. There’s a sort of maneuvering. And it’s somewhere between one size fits all, which we’ve abandoned, or one policy fits every situation, which we’ve also abandoned, and anything goes. And figuring out that space is what we all have to do going forward from here, I think.
The Ezra Klein Show Friday, September 17th, 2021
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