Re: NYTimes on Skidelsky's Keynes

[mongiovg@xxxxxxxxxxx (Mongiovi Gary)]

I haven't read Skidelsky's third volume yet, so I don't know what account
he gives of Britain's postwar decline.  I recall that his "The Road from
Serfdom" of a few years back makes a case that an excessively large
government sector leads to severe and chronic economic malaise--a more
sophisticated, more nuanced, and better written version of the argument
made by Yergin & Stanislaw in their dreadful "The Commanding Heights."  Has
Skidelsky moved away from the argument he made in "The Road from Serfdom"?
 Otherwise I'm not sure why he should find Nassar's argument "curious":
it's not all that different from the what he says in TRfS (though I don't
recall whether there he makes specific reference to Britain's postwar
troubles)..

Regards,

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From:	pdavidso [SMTP:pdavidso@xxxxxxx]
Sent:	Monday, January 21, 2002 3:53 PM
To:	Ian Murray
Cc:	pkt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject:	Re: NYTimes on Skidelsky's Keynes

Some may be interested in Robert Skidelsky's response to Sylvia Nassar's
review of his third volume.  Skidelsky wrote to me that it was curious that
Nasar thought that Britain was ruined by socialism, which is exactly what
Reagan said.


Skidelsky also indicated that the point is not that
Britain had a much smaller economy than the US after WWII (this was already
true in 1900) but that the war wrecked its commercial and financial
position.
In fact, Robert did not think this wrecking could have been completely
avoided
no matter what avoided, but it was his judgment that the Americans drove a
hard bargain. Skidelsky felt, however, that he had identified too much with
Keynes's own patriotic feelings to make this part of his argument
acceptable
to an American audience.


Any comments?

Paul

Paul Davidson
Editor, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics
University of Tennessee
SMC 523
Knoxville, Tennessee 37996-0550
phone # (865)974-4221; fax #(561)737-8262;
email pdavidson@xxxxxxx
http://econ.bus.utk.edu/Davidson.html