Brad DeLong — The Honest Broker: Mr. Piketty and the “Neoclassicists”: A Suggested Interpretation

The reference of course, is to Hicks (1937): “Mr Keynes and the ‘Classics’: A Suggested Interpretation”. An important, sprawling book of economic analysis. A complex and nonobvious relationship to a previous economics literature. Large political economy and policy stakes at hazard. Is this John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money? Or is this Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century?

I find the parallels intriguing. And so I am taking my task to be the task that John Hicks took upon himself back in 1937 with his “Mr. Keynes and the ‘Classics’: A Suggested Interpretation”: to build a bridge between Piketty’s formulations of the big issues and other, previous formulations that may be more standard and more familiar. Like Hicks’s, this bridge-building is immensely powerful but also immensely limited.

My reference is meant both as an endorsement of the power of the Hicks (1937) research project and as a recognition of its limitations. But to those who say they do not like the architecture of my bridge, I say: go build your own....

WCEG — The Equitablog
The Honest Broker: Mr. Piketty and the “Neoclassicists”: A Suggested Interpretation
Brad DeLong