“Although there are other heresies in The General Theory, along with puzzles, opacities, loose ends, confusions, errors, exaggerations, and anachronisms galore, they do not detract from the book's relevance to our present troubles. Economists may have forgotten The General Theory and moved on, but economics has not outgrown it, or the informal mode of argument that it exemplifies, which can illuminate nooks and crannies that are closed to mathematics. Keynes's masterpiece is many things, but "outdated" it is not.”

— Richard A. Posner

How I Became a Keynesian (2009)

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Richard A. Posner 11

United States federal judge 1939

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“Although Keynes’s General Theory provides the foundation for much of our current understanding of economic fluctuations, it is important to remember that classical economics provides the right answers to many fundamental questions.”

N. Gregory Mankiw (1958) American economist

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“Rather like the Bible is for many Christians, the General Theory is the essential economics reference which few economists have ever read.”

Steve Keen (1953) Australian economist

Source: Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001), Chapter 9, The Sum Of The Parts, p. 199

“In the years after 1936, whilst Hayek was working on The Pure Theory of Capital, most economists were convinced by Keynes, whose theory had an elegance and simplicity that Hayek’s did not. Keynes’ theory lacked Hayek’s theoretical rigor in that it was not based on equilibrium (on individual rationality), and there were places in the argument where Keynes relied on loose, informal arguments, preferring to put his trust in intuition rather than formal theory. Keynesians did not solve the problems with capital theory that Hayek had identified: they just bypassed or ignored them. According to Hayek’s methodological criteria, Keynes’ theory was decidedly inferior. Against this, Keynes’ theory provided opportunities for mathematical and statistical analysis that Hayek’s did not. Indeed, though Hayek paid some attention to data, he did so only minimally: he certainly made no attempt to test his theory against statistical data. The choice of Keynesian theory was, at least in part, a methodological one.”

Roger Backhouse (economist) (1951) British economist

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“The West never came close to proletarian revolution. The Left likes to believe that it did. They like to argue that 'Franklin Roosevelt saved capitalism from itself'. This is another way of saying that John Maynard Keynes saved capitalism from itself. Both arguments are incorrect. Roosevelt and Keynes met only once. Roosevelt correctly assessed Keynes as a mathematician, not an economist. This was true. Keynes got his degree in mathematics, not economics. Roosevelt was the source of what we call Keynesianism, 1933-36, not Keynes, whose General Theory appeared in 1936. But scholars like to believe that academic arguments shape the world. They don't. They conform what has already begun to take root in the thinking and practices of the general public. When men decided that "thou shalt not steal" means "thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote," the Keynesian worldview was born. This view is dominant today. Marxism is dead. So is " means this: it is immoral to steal, with or without majority vote. This has nothing to do with the mode of production.”

Gary North (economist) (1942) American Christian Reconstructionist and economic historian

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“Keynes was a great economist. In every discipline, progress comes from people who make hypotheses, most of which turn out to be wrong, but all of which ultimately point to the right answer. Now Keynes, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, set forth a hypothesis which was a beautiful one, and it really altered the shape of economics. But it turned out that it was a wrong hypothesis. That doesn't mean that he wasn't a great man!”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

As quoted in Opinion Journal (22 July 2006) http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008690

“When Keynes’s General Theory was published in February 1936, it obliterated all else on the scene in academic economics. Hayek was known to be working on a treatise on capital as Keynes’s work was published (the work that became The Pure Theory of Capital). While there was some anticipation in academia for this forthcoming major work, interest even by economists in Hayek’s work waned.”

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

“There [is]… a list of five tests which any body of doctrine which aspires to the name of economic theory must be able to meet:
1. Economic theory should unify economic science. - The task of a general body of theory in any subject is to give unity to its investigations…
2. Economic theory should be relevant to the modern problem of control. - Students of economics should spend their efforts upon subjects worth investigation…
3. The proper subject-matter of economic theory is institutions. - The demand that economic theory relate to institutions is implicit in the plea for its relevancy…
4. Economic theory is concerned with matters of process. - If economic theory is to treat of institutions it must know both the kinds of things institutions are and the kinds of things they are not…
5. Economic theory must be based upon an acceptable theory of human behavior.”

Walton Hale Hamilton (1881–1958) Yale Law Professor

After all control and institutions and processes are immediate things. They can all be translated into terms of human conduct...
Source: The Institutional Approach to Economic Theory, 1919, p. 311-6

“With the publication of J. M. Keynes’s General Theory in 1936 and the mathematical formalizations of his theory by J. R. Hicks (1937) and others, the language of macro-economic theory became systems of simultaneous equations. These are general equilibrium systems of interdependence in the sense that the relationships describe an entire national economy, not just a particular industry or sector. The systems are usually not completely closed; they depend on exogenous parameters including instruments controlled by policy-makers. Seeking definite relationships of economic outcomes to policies and other exogenous variables, qualitative and quantitative, these models sacrifice detail and generality, limiting the number of variables and equations by aggregations over agents, commodities, assets, and time.”

James Tobin (1918–2002) American economist

Source: "Money and Finance in the Macro-Economic Process" (1982), p. 12

“John Maynard Keynes may have had more influence on policy makers, Milton Friedman on citizens, Kenneth Arrow on economic theory, but Samuelson had more influence on the way economics is done today, and the purposes to which it is put, than any other economist of the twentieth century.”

David Warsh (1944) American journalist

David Warsh, "The Enormous Black Box" http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2009.12.13/841.html (2009)

“Argument is generally waste of time and trouble. It is better to present one’s opinion and leave it to stick or no as it may happen. If sound, it will probably in the end stick, and the sticking is the main thing.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Argument
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part X - The Position of a HomoUnius Libri

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