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What would Keynes have done?
Robert Skidelsky
The Independent
| Saturday, November 22, 2008
Expect plans for higher borrowing, tax cuts, and more spending in Monday's pre-Budget statement. With Britain sliding into depression, it is not surprising that the old Keynesian tool kit is being ransacked. But Keynesian economics is not just about fixing damaged economies. You don't need very sophisticated economics to spend your way out of a depression. In one form or other – usually by war or war preparations – governments have been doing this throughout history.
It does require very sophisticated economics to prove that depressions cannot happen. This was the economics Keynes set out to challenge in his great book, The General Theory ...
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Opinion: A peace deal for the whole of the Middle East
Robert Skidelsky
The independent
| Friday, November 24, 2006
The endgame is in sight in the Middle East. It has been brought into view by the growing recognition that Syria and Iran have to be involved, not just in negotiating an Iraqi settlement, but in underwriting peace in the Middle East as a whole.
It is increasingly accepted that the American-British-Israeli policy of reshaping the Middle East by military force has failed. The Americans have lacked the strength and the will to subdue Iraq (much less create a democracy there); the Israelis have failed to destroy Hizbollah in the Lebanon (or indeed quell the Palestinian insurgency); the US has failed to stop Iran's nuclear weapons ...
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Obituary J. K. Galbraith
Robert Skidelsky
The Independent
| Monday, May 01, 2006
For 20 years in the middle of the last century, John Kenneth Galbraith, who died yesterday at 97, was the "best known living economist". But he was not, and will never be, regarded as a great economist by economists. He is best thought of as a sociological economist, who tried to develop a theory and a policy from an analysis of the institutions of contemporary American capitalism. He had a genius for significant description, and wrote with confidence, wit and a notable talent for phrase-making, but the theory he sought proved elusive and he had no lasting effect on policy.
His big idea was that the "market system" lauded by economists ...
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Essay: Confessions of a long-distance biographer
Robert Skidelsky
independent on Sunday
| Sunday, November 23, 2003
It is no secret that I have spent a large chunk of my life writing about the economist John Maynard Keynes. In 1973, a few months after my son Edward was born, he got a postcard from my mother-in-law. She clearly believed in encouraging early habits of reading. It was of Gwen Raverat's famous watercolour of Keynes as a young man. "This is a gentleman whom you and Mummy and Daddy will soon grow to hate v. enormously I expect. He looks a bit furtive to me." My son Edward is now 30.
My original 1970 contract with Macmillan was to write a single- volume 150,000 word biography to be delivered "not later than 31 December 1972". This must rank ...
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Opinion: Beware the collectivisation of education
Robert Skidelsky
The independent
| Monday, March 20, 2000
TONY BLAIR'S view of the history of education is one of state neglect with occasional exceptions. I don't want to say there's no truth in this story. But there is an alternative story to be told, which is not one of neglect but one of creeping collectivisation.
On the resources side, this culminated in the abolition of all fee- paying in local authority and voluntary aided schools in 1944, and the creation thereafter of an apartheid between an independent fee- paying sector, educating less than 10 per cent of all pupils, and a free - that is, tax-financed - state sector. Roughly the same thing happened, at roughly the same time in ...
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