Keynes and Macro

["LYNN TURGEON, PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF ECONOMICS, HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY, ECOELT@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <ECOELT@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Goncalo Fonseca has asked me to expand on my classification of Simon Kuznets as
"anti-Keynesian." Perhaps "non-Keynesian" would be a more proper
classification. It seems to me that Kuznets like Leontief both reflected their
Russian origins.
	The Russians were pioneers in national income calculations as well as
input-output techniques. One of the earliest works on national income
accounting was by Sergei Prokopovicz in 1906. He migrated to Czechoslovakia
after the Russian Revolution and continued his pioneer work there. Kuznets
emigrated from Ukraine after the 1917 Revolution and Leontief waited until 1924
and actually worked on something similar to input-output calculations. Both are
somewhat outside the mainstream of economics and/or mavericks despite the fact
that they represented serious brain drains from socialism. In David Collander's
great book on the Coming of Keynesianism to America, someone mentioned that
Leontief dropped in on the Hansen seminar once to twice.
	I was in graduate school in the late forties and remember the
"Neanderthal Keynesianism" of that time.  We were assigned the Arthur Burns
1946 NBER piece that was clearly anti-Keynesian and opposed to the common
Keynesian belief that the U.S. economy was headed for another depression or at
least a recession of considerable consequence. Burns's reputation was made by
going against the Keynesian stream and was rewarded by Eisenhower selecting him
to chair his CEA (the alternative was to disband the CEA entirely). Burns
stepped down after the first term and retured to academia and headed the NBER
for a time. He advised Ike to cut taxes before the 1960 election to insure
Nixon's election, but was rejected to Nixon's regret.
	Both Kuznets and Burns were mentored by Wesley Clair Mitchell but he
died shortly after the war so that they were perhaps the most prestigious
economists at the Bureau. Stigler was also active there around 1950. Thus, it
is not surprising that Kuznets' study of income distribution deplored increased
equality arising during the war because of its negative effect on savings.
George Gilder would run with this idea lat er in writing the New Testament of
supply-side economics that influenced Reagan.
	As a Neanderthal or Classical Keynesian, I was educated to believe that
investment was the dog that  wagged the savings tail, something that Kuznets
apparently rejected. His conclusion that there was a tendency for a secular
increase in equality showing up in capitalist income distribution was simply
repeating Alfred Marshall and has been clearly repudiated by subsequent events
or developments. I have a number of references to Kuznets in my recent
Bastard Keynesianism.
	I wonder if there is some sort of Russian mindset against Keynes.
Stalin had good reasons for rejecting the Keynesian interpretation of World War
II by Eugene Varga since it implied that there could be no necessary "crisis"
after the war. Subsequent developments have vindicated Varga's analysis, but no
Russians outside of Menshikov (writing rom Rotterdam) and Sergei Glaziev, who
was one of two Lebed advisers in the first round of Russia's June election,
seem to have been influenced by Keynes.  Lynn Turgeon