Keynes Hayek The Clash that Defined Modern Economics

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 Cambridge 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 embrace 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 contemporary relevance of Keynes and Hayek, as present-day arguments over the virtues of the free market and government intervention rage with the same ferocity as they did in the 1930s.

John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek peered at each other across a yawning gap that defined the most potent economic battle of our time: whether governments should intervene in markets. Both men's ideas would swing in and out of favor with politicians from Franklin Roosevelt to George W. Bush and would eventually influence the livelihood of millions. Keynes Hayek vividly examines the spirited debates between two giants of the twentieth century, whose disparate visions still shape the rise and fall of economies all over the world. Nicholas Wapshott is a journalist and the author of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage. A former senior editor at the London Times and the New York Sun, he lives in New York City.