This is an interview with Geoff Harcourt, an Australian economist who studied in Cambridge with Nick Kaldor, Joan Robinson, Piero Sraffa, Richard Kahn, etc. The first twenty five minutes are all biography, but then he gets into his time at Cambridge. Lots of interesting anecdotes and thoughts on the Keynesian community there in the 1950s.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Thursday, February 24, 2011
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Going to see the video, but life among the Cambridge economics faculty is supposed to have been...interesting back then in the 1950s.
ReplyDeleteAmartya Sen recounted that it was a time of great intra-Keynesian feuding, and we all know how his instructor Joan Robinson used to feel about "bastard Keynesianism" in America. The Trinity College group was the one sole place which stayed out of politically charged economics.
The common thing between Cambridge Keynesians and American Keynesians seems to have been the occasional tendency to make overly bold predictions. Prematurely, some of them praised Mao's autarky and late-era Soviet Union as strong, sustainable state models for decades to come - Joan Robinson, Paul Samuelson, and J. K. Galbraith all were guilty. (I say it is akin to the Peter Schiffs and Marc Fabers of today who warn of Zimbabwean hyperinflation in the West.)
It is typical of some sneaky opportunists to seize up on this and say, "Ha! They're communists!" No, they were not communists, but they were probably hoping to use them as imperfect examples of successes of activist governments, under mild annoyances at the liberal tendencies of US or UK. Men like Galbraith felt there was prosperity in people's private lives, but poverty in their public lives, and seemed to desparately search for real-life alternatives.
BUT, one would assume that if Joan Robinson and company were ever called communists, they can justifiably roll their eyes and say they are moderates with no such agenda. Yet, they made the mistake of using that bloc as a model for some of their ideas.