Why did Keynes suddenly become so popular, compared to economists like Mises and Rothbard?
When the court intellectual jester tells the king what he wants to hear, the king can use the “status” of the intellectual jester to bolster support for his schemes.
Dunno. It’s a mystery to me how Keynes became so popular compared to equally crappy and statist economists of the time like Catchings and Foster.
“When the court intellectual jester tells the king what he wants to hear, the king can use the “status” of the intellectual jester to bolster support for his schemes.”
That summarised the fundamental reason for the popularity of Lord Keynes. I found the following reasons also convincing:
- He was a quasi-social credit believer, althougt he didn’t push too hard the idea that government should finance it deficits with printing the money itself, so even banks began to like him, when they could borrow cheaply and finance speculatively projects or buy government debt with money created out of thin air.
- He had good connections to the English intellectual progressives through the ”Bloomsbury group”. Many socialist’s also took his underconsumptionist theories warmly, especially because he opposed cutting the wages.
- He had a good reputation as a forecaster when he critisised Churchill’s deflationary return to gold pound (around 1926) and when he critisised the way Germany was treated in Versailles (around 1920).
- Although he was a fundamentalist believer of government interventionism (praised some aspects of Nazi Germany), he could give impression that he was against totalitarianism (praised Hayek’s Road to Serfdom).
- He came from a respected English family and had charming personality. Everyone hated to debate this extremely tall man (almost 7 feet) and that gave the impression that he was right.
because he was bisexual
In other words, he could pander to anyone and everyone’s tastes. If only bisexuality were all there was to it… [:P]
the collectivists needed a hero. someone who would tell them that their fraudulent schemes were, in reality, great ideas meant for the good of all. If Keynes specifically hadn’t come along, some other guy named Bob would have written the idea down instead and we’d all by talking about Bobian economics today. Keynes was a product of the time.
Because Keynes was a damn good economist, and because Mises and Rothbard didn’t supply those in power with a positive role they could play in the economy and were too radical for their time (keep in mind socialism was more popular then than it is now). In all honestly, I am puzzled as to why Hayek wasn’t just as popular as Keynes. Perhaps, it was simply historical accident (Continental economics was out of favor and English economics was the “in thing”).
Marketing, self-fulfilled prophecy of media coverage on his works (hint: media either never covered rothbard, hayek, etc. at all or not with such fervor as with Keynes, & nowadays, Krugman).
People to this day, when they attempt to describe economics, it is mostly in Keynesian terms which are both watered down to be easier to learn & to obscufate challenges to Keysnian theory (i.e. Keynesian economics have become popular synonymous, unconsciously, in society, with economics itself).
Logic, economics, etc. are not focused on early on in public schools, & are white-washed later on when actually covered, for the sake of confusing the average citizen into submission that “economics is beyond their understanding”, thus, part of the reputation of economics as “the dismal science”.
That’s just my view, however; I agree with 2 other posts here that offer more fleshed out reasons.
The Austrian model seemed to its exponents to yield nihilistic policy implications for dealing with the depression… The only remedy was to let the passage of time restore equilibrium between the desired time-structures of consumption and production. This message had considerable resonance in conservative financial market circles where “passive-money? banking school ideas taught that one had to await recovery before allowing credit and money to expand. But it also ran counter to a widespread political desire in more progressive circles, to defend the liberal political order against the idea that only totalitarian regimes could manage the economy - recall the political situation in europe in the mid-1930s. This is an important reason why the theoretical ideas of The General Theory caught on so quickly after 1936, and why Austrian theory was abandoned.
–David Laidler