Roger Garrison reviews Tyler Beck Goodspeed’s Rethinking the Keynesian Revolution: Keynes, Hayek, and the Wicksell Connection (Oxford, 2012) for EH.Net. Writes Roger:
The most recent episodes of unsustainable booms (centered on digital technology in the 1990s and housing in the 2000s) have rekindled interest in the clash between Keynes and Hayek. Which one had it straight about business cycles? In Goodspeed’s view, “the Wicksell connection” – a phrase drawn from the title of a 1981 article by Axel Leijonhufvud – turns the Keynes-Hayek dissonance (as perceived during the 1930s by the principals – and by everyone else) into consonance. Owing to the Wicksell connection, there was, in the author’s view, “a fundamental convergence of Keynes’s and Hayek’s respective theories of money, capital, and the business cycle during the course of the 1930s” (emphasis in the original, p. 3). This claim stands in stark contrast to the more common understanding that by the end of that decade, Hayek’s views were buried under the Keynesian Avalanche (McCormick, 1992).Read the whole thing here. (Bonus: My review of McCormick’s Hayek and the Keynesian Avalanche).
