Mark Hayes, John Maynard Keynes: the art of choosing the right model
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BOOK REVIEW
Mark Hayes, John Maynard Keynes: the art of choosing the right model Polity Press, Cambridge (UK), 2020, xv + 195 pp., 62.20 € Mario A. Cedrini1 Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2020
Mark Hayes passed away 10 days before last Christmas, shortly after presenting his second book on John Maynard Keynes. The founder (in 1990) and director of Shared Interest, a UK ethical investment cooperative providing finance (and making remarkable achievements) to fair trade businesses, Hayes acted as Secretary of the Post-Keynesian Economics Society from 2006 to 2016 and actively contributed to the development of heterodoxy in economics. Written by one of the last ‘‘Keynes scholar’’, ‘‘John Maynard Keynes. The Art of Choosing the Right Model’’ tells us why—despite the tremendous influence that Keynes had on the post-war world— ‘‘The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money’’ remains a neglected work, but also why we would better rescue it from oblivion. In the author’s ambitions, the book can be read either from cover to cover or by selecting specific parts of it, depending on what readers are looking for (that is, also, who they are). By explicit admission, chapters 1 and 8, ‘‘Why study Keynes’’ and ‘‘Keynes for Today’’ respectively, should allow readers to decide by themselves, using also Chapter 7 (‘‘The Keynesian Era’’) for historical context, whether Keynes’s economic thought is still relevant, today, to theory and policy. Keynes’s ‘‘model’’ stands in complete opposition to the one developed within the walls of the classical citadel from which the Cambridge economist explicitly sought to escape. Hayes thus exposes Keynes’s revolution (the principle of effective demand) in Chapter 3, in opposition to both the simple ‘‘corn model’’ of the classical theory, illustrated in Chapter 2 and the various reductions of ‘‘The General Theory’’ to other (simpler, more policy-oriented, or less antagonistic with respect to the classical theory) models—the theory of loanable funds, the IS-LM diagram (Chapter 4, ‘‘The Great Confusion’’). Chapter 5 provides a historical account of how Keynes came to break with the quantity theory of money, while Chapter 6 (‘‘From Versailles to Bretton Woods’’) deals with his view of international monetary relations. & Mario A. Cedrini [email protected] 1
Dipartimento di Economia e Statistica ‘‘Cognetti de Martiis’’, Universita` di Torino, Torino, Italy
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M. A. Cedrini
Space constraints evidently prevent us from offering even a summary report of Hayes’s book. Readers might rather legitimately expect to find here some reasons why they should consider another book on Keynes, in view of the extensive literature generated by the financial crisis, the Great Recession, the European crisis. Hayes remarks on several occasions throughout the book—starting from the Preface—that his Keynes (in primis, the reading of ‘‘The General Theory’’ therein proposed) is different from both the Keynes of textbooks and the one of many Ke
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