Happy Anniversary, Mr. Keynes: Victoria Chick and Ann Pettifor

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From the Publication of Bloomberg Opinion

Never has a book on economics been so anticipated.

John Maynard Keynes’s “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” was published 75 years ago today. Back then, there were queues outside the Economists’ Bookshop in Houghton Street, London. Opening hours had to be extended to deal with the rush of those eager for an alternative to policies that had ruined the global economy.

The impact on the field of economics wasn’t unlike that on the scientific community when Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species” in 1859. Just as with Darwin’s book, Keynes’s shook the foundations of economic orthodoxy and had profound effects on his profession. The main thrust of Keynes’s work was also met with outright denial from his peers, including close colleagues, who reduced his theory to what one described as “diagrams and bits of algebra.” Above all, they denied the centrality of his theory of the rate of interest.

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