Review: Will Straw ed., Going for Growth
Renewal - ISSN 0968-5211
Volume 19 Number 3-4 (2011)
Review: Will Straw ed., Going for Growth
Noel Thompson pages -
Abstract
Going for Growth
Will Straw (ed.) ippr, 2011
Reviewed by Noel Thompson
‘In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only say that when the storm is long past the ocean will be flat once again’. Keynes’s challenge to economists in his Tract on Monetary Reform is as relevant today as it was in the 1920s. Iterated in a context where Great War public expenditure had significantly inflated the National Debt and contributed to the turbulence of the immediate post-war period, Keynes warned against any notion that fiscal retrenchment and the equilibrating properties of the market would be sufficient to move the economy back to full employment and sustained growth. The Tract itself proposed a more active and imaginative monetary policy but his later work emphasised the need for state intervention in the form of increased public expenditure, both to supplement private sector activity and to create the kind of infrastructure and confidence that would allow that sector to flourish. Again, there are powerful parallels with contemporary concerns; rendered even more powerful by recent events.
To cite this article
Noel Thompson (2011) Review: Will Straw ed., Going for Growth, Renewal, 19(3-4 ), -