On 7/11/10, Keith Hudson <[email protected]> wrote: > Although Keynes went off the rails by > rejecting Say and Smith, he had the courage at the end of his life to admit > that he'd been wrong. That counts for a lot in my view.
You really need to be more specific about precisely WHAT Keynes repudiated. He famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" Is that admitting he'd been wrong? Well, yeah, but in a non-specific way. Adam Smith said a lot of things, some of them brilliant, some wacky and not all of them consistent. One can BOTH agree and disagree with Smith. One can also agree with Say, provided one picks the occasion. Say, too changed his mind. Both Smith and Say (like Marx, Keynes, Hayek and Freud) were victims of posthumous cults that took trivial sound bites from their works, twisted them and elevated them to holy scripture. Did Keynes reject the cant of the vulgar classical political economists of the 19th century and mistakenly attribute it to Say or Smith and then later retract the unkind attribution? This is not to say that Keynes wasn't wrong in some respects, but possibly these were not the things that he admitted were wrong. By the way, for a critique of Keynes, I would go to Fred Hirsh rather than Fred Hayek. It is so hard, when people's names become an ism, to separate what they were about from some wholly amorphous and mostly incorrect image of what they proposed. Even most of the popular quotations attributed to famous people were actually said by somebody else. -- Sandwichman _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
