KEYNES, COORDINATION AND BEYOND

This book argues that the coordination problem lies at the heart of Keynes’s economics. It shows how Keynes’s message got lost in the post-War period and develops a more fruitful extension of Keynes’s ideas within a general equilibrium framework and alternative frameworks such as post Keynesian and Austrian economics. It is demonstrated that in the absence of a coordinating device like the Walrasian auctioneer or in the presence of uncertainty, coordination can no longer be superimposed. This ultimately implies that apart from some notable exceptions, the Keynesian revolution was in fact stifled at birth because the validity of the central concepts of microeconomics have never been challenged.

This lively and fascinating book is likely to provoke debate amongst economists and policymakers. Its conclusions place a question mark over the development of economic theory since the Second World War.