The End of Laissez-faire

by John Maynard Keynes

Overview

In The End of Laissez-faire, Keynes presents a brief historical review of laissez-faire economic policy. Though he agrees in principle that the marketplace should be free of government interference, he suggests that government can play a constructive role in protecting individuals from the worst harms of capitalism's cycles, especially as concerns unemployment. When the Great Depression struck a few years later, this work seemed very prescient.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940158795343
Publisher:	Richmond: Hogarth, Sidney Ball and Universität Ber
Publication date:	09/23/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	NOOK Book
Pages:	81
Sales rank:	515,255
File size:	742 KB

About the Author

John Maynard Keynes was a British economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and is widely considered to be one of the most influential economists of the 20th century and the founder of modern macroeconomics.[3][4][5][6] His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics and its various offshoots.

In the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, challenging the ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. He instead argued that aggregate demand determined the overall level of economic activity and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions.