When you take a book by Keynes down off the shelf, you’re not taking Keynes himself down off the shelf. It’s not like those heads in jars from Futurama. It’s a book. Its core contents have been synthesised for a modern audience, with the benefit of decades of subsequent analysis, in every contemporary macroeconomics textbook worth its salt.
It might be worth your time, at some point, to read the original Keynes, just as it might be worth your time to read the original Origin of Species. But don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re tapping into the secret wisdom of an ancient master. It’s a book. It’s been widely available for several decades, and the discipline has not been standing still for all that time.
Also, if you’re frequently in the sort of discussions where people are arguing about what dead economists did or did not say, I humbly suggest you re-evaluate those discussions.
Five minutee has not found me the link but there is a much upvoted post on the value of reading the Classics or Great Works of a field. IIRC Vassar commented that outside of fields like Math or Chemistry where progress is completely unambiguous it’s a good idea. Darwin invented, conceived and distinguished natural and sexual selection in his greatest work. Despite this sexual selection was more or less rediscovered from scratch starting in the 70′s.
Macroeconomists are still talking about DSGE models, right now, after the Great Recession. I recall a recent crooked timber post about a macro survey book which (basically ignored Keynes and Keynesianism)[http://crookedtimber.org/2014/02/10/macroeconomics-made-easy/]. If population genetics can ignore Darwin to its detriment macroeconomics is entirely capable of underselling Keynes.
When you take a book by Keynes down off the shelf, you’re not taking Keynes himself down off the shelf. It’s not like those heads in jars from Futurama. It’s a book. Its core contents have been synthesised for a modern audience, with the benefit of decades of subsequent analysis, in every contemporary macroeconomics textbook worth its salt.
It might be worth your time, at some point, to read the original Keynes, just as it might be worth your time to read the original Origin of Species. But don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re tapping into the secret wisdom of an ancient master. It’s a book. It’s been widely available for several decades, and the discipline has not been standing still for all that time.
Also, if you’re frequently in the sort of discussions where people are arguing about what dead economists did or did not say, I humbly suggest you re-evaluate those discussions.
Five minutee has not found me the link but there is a much upvoted post on the value of reading the Classics or Great Works of a field. IIRC Vassar commented that outside of fields like Math or Chemistry where progress is completely unambiguous it’s a good idea. Darwin invented, conceived and distinguished natural and sexual selection in his greatest work. Despite this sexual selection was more or less rediscovered from scratch starting in the 70′s.
Macroeconomists are still talking about DSGE models, right now, after the Great Recession. I recall a recent crooked timber post about a macro survey book which (basically ignored Keynes and Keynesianism)[http://crookedtimber.org/2014/02/10/macroeconomics-made-easy/]. If population genetics can ignore Darwin to its detriment macroeconomics is entirely capable of underselling Keynes.