What I admire in Keynes, to the smallish
extent that I am acquainted with his own writings, rather than
secondary representations of it, is his knack for unprepossessed
realism.
He was not anti-capitalist but highly critical of capitalism; he was a
confessing bourgeois but sceptical of bourgeois culture. As a citizen
and public servant, he was committed to his country, in large part by
questioning it with constructive intent.
In looking at economics, what I find most frustrating above all is
the apparent inability of its various proponents to escape ideological
commitment and groupthink. On this count, the left is no better than the
right. The “ideologicity” of its practitioners seems to be another sign
of the discipline’s immaturity.
I wish economists were more like Keynes, who focussed, like all great
scientists, not on a hidden agenda of conceit, but on a problem. He
would go where he could find solutions to the problem rather than where
his conceit would send or leave him.
This is a comment I wrote in response to this article.
