E-piphany

Last week I mentioned something about what Keynes said in the General Theory, and promised to expand on that a bit this week. I will do so, in the form of a book review.

I can’t remember who it was, and I’m sorry, but one of the people who read my articles suggested a book to me a year or so ago published in 2009 and called Where Keynes Went Wrong: And Why World Governments Keep Creating Inflation, Bubbles, and Busts  by Hunter Lewis, and I finally got around to reading it. I am very glad I did – this book is terrific, and is a must-read if you are either pro-Keynes or anti-Keynes.

Of course, readers will know from my articles that I am anti-Keynes, although more precisely I am anti-Keynesian in the modern sense of that word. I never read very much of the General Theory, because honestly it is poorly written in the sense of its prose, and I always assumed that Keynes probably had some great insights and it was the later Keynesians that screwed up what he said.

Oh, I was so wrong. Keynes was looney tunes. A bona fide lunatic. He proved masterful in manipulating the cult of personality that existed at the time he was writing, however; he was adept at destroying his opponents in ways that sounded erudite and like certain later personalities the media adored him. All of this is well-documented by Mr. Lewis, although the looney tunes conclusion is my own.

The book is put together brilliantly. The author quotes passages from Keynes, using actual quotes interspersed with paraphrasing – which is necessary because, as I said above, the General Theory is poorly written and opaque. But it isn’t the paraphrasing that is damning. When Mr. Lewis wants to indict Keynes, he does it with his own words. For example, in unraveling the absurd (and often self-contradictory) prescriptions that Keynes had for managing the macro economy, Mr. Lewis declares that Keynes thought government should never raise interest rates. That’s right, never.[1] But you needn’t take Lewis’ word for it. Here’s Keynes, cited in the book:

“The remedy for the boom is not a higher rate of interest but a lower rate of interest! For that may enable the boom to last. The right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump; but in abolishing slumps and thus keeping us permanently in a quasi-boom.”[2]

If you are anything like me, that sent a shiver down your spine right now. Does that sound at all familiar? Keep in mind that Lewis wrote this book in 2009. He could not possibly have anticipated that interest rates would not move away from zero for seven years (and counting, in some countries). And yet this quote sounds to me so much like what the Mount Rushmore of Fed speakers seemed to be suggesting last week. “It worked,” Bernanke was saying. “We’re not in a bubble economy,” said Yellen. None of them saw any signs of serious imbalances, except Volcker (and he was fairly circumspect about how worrisome they were).

In my own book, I indict Keynesianism in the simplest way: I simply point out that the prescription of the Keynesians hasn’t only not worked, it also has failed in every major prediction since, basically forever. But Lewis attacks Keynes himself, with his own words, from the original source. He explains, very clearly, where Keynes went wrong. If you wonder why world governments keep screwing up economies…you should read this book.

[1] Apparently elsewhere Keynes said different things but in the General Theory he was consistent on this point.

[2] Keynes, General Theory, p. 322; quoted on page 20 of Where Keynes Went Wrong by Hunter Lewis.