Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics

Hardcover. Pub Date: December 2011 Pages: 382 Publisher: WW Norton & Co. As the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the world into Turmoil Two men emerged with competing CLAIMS on how to restore balance to economies gone awry. John Maynard Keynes. the mercurial Camidge economist. believed that government had a duty to spend when others would not. He met his opposite in a little-known Austrian economics professor. Freidrich Hayek. who considered attempts to intervene both pointless and potentially dangerous. The battle lines thus drawn. Keynesian economics would dominate for decades and coincide with an era of unprecedented prosperity. but conservative economists and political leaders would eventually emace and execute Hayek's contrary vision. From their first face-to-face encounter to the heated arguments between their ardent disciples. Nicholas Wapshott here unearths the con...