John Maynard Keynes article in The New Yorker.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/10/111010fa_fact_cassidy


In 1933, Keynes made the case that one dollar of additional government spending could ultimately generate two dollars in additional output and income. This was the so-called “multiplier” effect. These days, the strongest evidence for Keynesianism has been negative. The recent slowdown in the U.S. economy occurred just as Obama’s 2009 stimulus package was running dry.

Astute conservatives have sometimes acknowledged that, fundamentally, Keynes was one of them. He came not to bury free enterprise but to save it from itself. Keynes understood how a financially driven economy, like ours, can go into self-sustaining downward spirals (and upward spirals) under the influence of crowd psychology and chronic uncertainty about the future.

Keynes’s vision calls not merely for management of risk but for something politically and intellectually far more demanding: the acknowledgement of uncertainty.

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