Political Economy and the Public Purpose

Abstract

Joan Robinson’ s Ely lecture provides a convenient ingress to this chapter, which is primarily concerned with the third volume of Galbraith’ s trilogy, Economics and the Public Purpose. An early dissident from the neoclassical synthesis, Robinson had been very much engaged in the capital controversy between the two Cambridges (England and Massachusetts) and adamantly insisted that the neo-Keynesian interpretation of Keynes was erroneous; her epithet for those who adhered to it was the ‘ bastard Keynesians’ (Robinson, 1974; see also Gibson, 2005). Thus Robinson, literally an original Keynesian economist who was in Cambridge when Keynes was formulating The General Theory, and Galbraith, one of the earliest and staunchest American articulators of Keynes, agreed that the New Economics was critically inadequate.

The persistence of a way of thinking which somehow fails to take account of what are proving to be the basic realities of modern economic life is itself one of the great economic mysteries of our civilization.

C. E. Ayres, 1944

What must we know in order to gain systematic understanding of the economic activities of a human group, and by what intellectual techniques can such economic knowledge be obtained?

Adolph Lowe, 1977