Keynes, Hayek och Tea party-rörelsen.
In the best scene in The Standard of Living, James Graham’s new play about John Maynard Keynes, Keynes and fellow economist Friedrich Hayek are on fire duty on the roof of King’s College chapel, locked in debate as they wait for German bombs to drop.
It’s all the better for being based in fact.
Hayek argues that government intervention in markets during a downturn only makes things worse.
Keynes responds. Since 1930, he says, the most vital forces in politics have been on the far left or the far right.
Many of the brightest undergraduates at his beloved University of Cambridge were seduced by the deceptive certainties of Marxism. Hayek’s stance will only reinforce this tendency, he argues, while the future of civilization depends on reviving the vital center.
Why does Keynes continue to fascinate us 80 years after his death? And — more importantly — does he have any lessons for us as we grapple with yet another crisis of the liberal order?
The answer to the first question is easy. Keynes was a great man of a sort that we have almost lost today:
a first-rate economist who was also one of the best writers of his generation; a successful academic who was also immersed in the real world; a public figure who also hung out with bohemian intellectuals; and, of course, one of the leading architects of the postwar order.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell, hardly a numbskull, said that Keynes’s intellect was “the sharpest and clearest that I have ever known. When I argued with him, I felt that I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool.”
The second question is a more difficult one because the obvious answer — that we need another Keynesian revolution to pull us out of our current despond — is completely wrong.
Hayek. He and his acolytes took advantage of the troubles of the 1970s to seize control of the global economy and reintroduce the dismal free market orthodoxies that led to the Great Depression.
Public spending was reined in. The free market was turned into a god. And the welfare state was pared back to almost nothing.
Hayek’s supposed counter-revolution was more in the world of ideas and rhetoric than reality.
So, why is Keynes still relevant if the last thing we need is more deficit spending and welfare provision? One answer is a paradoxical one: his commitment to intellectual flexibility.
Though frequently attributed to him, Keynes may not have actually said “when the facts change, I change my mind,” but it does express the spirit of his thinking.
This means bringing the level of global debt down in order to give ourselves more room for maneuver when real depression threatens.
Adrian Wooldridge Bloomberg October 22, 2026
Is Keynesianism dead?
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/09/is-keynesianism-dead-new-era.html
Keynes, Ai and the “economic possibilities for our grandchildren.”
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/02/keynes-ai-and-economic-possibilities.html
Beskyllningen mot Tea party-rörelsen är att den förstår samhällsekonomi i termer av hushållsekonomi. Experterna skrattar åt denna naivitet.
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/10/tea-party-movement.html
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