by Robert Lucas and his Keynesian credentials In his Keynote Address to the 2003 History of Political Economy Conference, Robert Lucas said: Well, I’m not here to tell people in this group about the history of monetary thought. I guess I’m here as a kind of witness from a vanished culture, the heyday of Keynesian economics. It’s like historians rushing to interview the last former slaves before they died, or the last of the people who remembered growing up in a Polish shtetl. I am going to tell you what it was like growing up in a day when Keynesian economics was taught as a solid basis on which macroeconomics could proceed. My credentials? Was I a Keynesian myself? Absolutely. And does my Chicago training disqualify me for that? No, not at all. David
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Robert Lucas and his Keynesian credentials
In his Keynote Address to the 2003 History of Political Economy Conference, Robert Lucas said:
Well, I’m not here to tell people in this group about the history of
monetary thought. I guess I’m here as a kind of witness from a vanished
culture, the heyday of Keynesian economics. It’s like historians rushing
to interview the last former slaves before they died, or the last of the
people who remembered growing up in a Polish shtetl. I am going to tell
you what it was like growing up in a day when Keynesian economics
was taught as a solid basis on which macroeconomics could proceed.
My credentials? Was I a Keynesian myself? Absolutely. And does my
Chicago training disqualify me for that? No, not at all. David Laidler
[who was present at the conference] will agree with me on this, and I will
explain in some detail when I talk about my education. Our Keynesian
credentials, if we wanted to claim them, were as good as could be obtained
in any graduate school in the country in 1963.I thought when I was trying to prepare some notes for this talk
that people attending the conference might be arguing about Axel
Leijonhufvud’s thesis that IS-LM was a distortion of Keynes, but I didn’t
really hear any of this in the discussions this afternoon. So I’m going to
think about IS-LM and Keynesian economics as being synonyms. I remember
when Leijonhufvud’s book2 came out and I asked my colleague
Gary Becker if he thought Hicks had got the General Theory right with
his IS-LM diagram. Gary said, “Well, I don’t know, but I hope he did,
because if it wasn’t for Hicks I never would have made any sense out of
that damn book.” That’s kind of the way I feel, too, so I’m hoping Hicks
got it right.
Mirabile dictu! I’m a Keynesian — although I haven’t understood anything of what Keynes wrote, but I’ve read anoher guy who said he had read his book, so I hope for the best and assume he got it right (which Hicks actually didn’t, and was intellectually honest to admit in at least three scientific publications published about twenty years before Lucas statement). In truth a very scientific attitude. No wonder the guy after having deluded himself into believing (?) being a Keynesian — although actually only elaborating upon a model developed and then disowned by John Hicks — got the “Nobel prize” in economics …