When turmoil strikes world monetary and financial markets, leaders invariably call for 'a new Bretton Woods' to prevent catastrophic economic disorder and defuse political conflict. The name of the ...remote New Hampshire town where representatives of forty-four nations gathered in July 1944, in the midst of the century's second great war, has become shorthand for enlightened globalization. The actual story surrounding the historic Bretton Woods accords, however, is full of startling drama, intrigue, and rivalry, which are vividly brought to life in Benn Steil's epic account.
Upending the conventional wisdom that Bretton Woods was the product of an amiable Anglo-American collaboration, Steil shows that it was in reality part of a much more ambitious geopolitical agenda hatched within President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Treasury and aimed at eliminating Britain as an economic and political rival. At the heart of the drama were the antipodal characters of John Maynard Keynes, the renowned and revolutionary British economist, and Harry Dexter White, the dogged, self-made American technocrat. Bringing to bear new and striking archival evidence, Steil offers the most compelling portrait yet of the complex and controversial figure of White--the architect of the dollar's privileged place in the Bretton Woods monetary system, who also, very privately, admired Soviet economic planning and engaged in clandestine communications with Soviet intelligence officials and agents over many years.
A remarkably deft work of storytelling that reveals how the blueprint for the postwar economic order was actually drawn,The Battle of Bretton Woodsis destined to become a classic of economic and political history.
Sixty years after his death, the life and thought of the economist, John Maynard Keynes, continues to be a subject of the greatest interest to scholars. Yet one of the most significant areas of ...Keynes' thinking has been strangely overlooked - international relations, a subject that was always of central importance to him. The purpose of this book is to explore comprehensively, for the first time, the evolution of Keynes' thinking on international relations , and to show how this is linked to the changing of his opinions on economic matters, in a way which deepens our understanding of both. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/politicalscience/0198292368/toc.html
As the global economic crisis continues to cause damage, some policy makers have called for a more Keynesian approach to current economic problems. In this book, the economists Peter Temin and David ...Vines provide an accessible introduction to Keynesian ideas that connects Keynes's insights to today's global economy and offers readers a way to understand current policy debates.John Maynard Keynes (1883--1946) created the branch of economics now known as macroeconomics. He played a major role in the reconstruction of Europe and the world economy after the Second World War. Keynesian economics came to be identified with efforts to mitigate the Great Depression and with postwar economic policies that helped power a golden age of economic growth. Temin and Vines argue that Keynes also provided a way to understand the interactions among nations, and therein lies his relevance for today's global crisis. Temin and Vines survey economic thinking before Keynes and explain how difficult it was for Keynes to escape from conventional wisdom. They set out the Keynesian analysis of a closed economy and expand the analysis to the international economy, using a few simple graphs to present Keynes's formal analyses in an accessible way. They discuss problems of today's world economy, showcasing the usefulness of a simple Keynesian approach to current economic policy choices. Keynesian ideas, they argue, can lay the basis for a return to economic growth.
Alfred Marshall was one of the most important economists ever to have lived. This excellent new book, from a Marshall expert respected the world over, attempts to show that Marshall anticipated some ...of the views that are now associated with the cognitive sciences.
Examining Marshall's philosophy of the human mind, his overall approach to economics, his concern for socio-economic issues, and the fertility of his framework, this book breathes fresh life into the fascinating world of Marshallian economics.
Well-connected in academia, business and government, John Maynard Keynes was one of the most influential economic theorists of the twentieth century. It appears that his theories will be just as ...important for the twenty-first. As Keynes himself explained, his ideas throughout his life were influenced by the moral philosophy he learned as an undergraduate. Nevertheless, the meaning and significance for Keynes of this early philosophy have remained largely unexplored.
Keynes and the British Humanist Tradition offers an interpretation of Keynes’s early philosophy and its implications for his later thought. It approaches that philosophy from the perspective of the nineteenth century intellectual context out of which it emerged. The book argues that roots of Keynes’s early beliefs are to be found in the traditions of the Apostles, the very famous secret society to which he and most of his teachers belonged. The principles of Keynes’s philosophy can be seen in such writers as John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick, but the underlying ideas have been obscured by changing fashions in philosophy and thus require excavation and reconstruction.
This book will be of interest to students and researchers in the history of economics, in particular the thought of John Maynard Keynes, especially his ethics, politics and economics.
David Andrews is currently Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Richmond and Associate Professor, State University of New York at Oswego, USA.
1. Introduction 2. Religion 3. Morals 4. Politics 5. Economics 6. Conclusion
This paper presents a reinterpretation of Keynes' philosophical motivations, focussing on his essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren". Keynes' 1930 vision of the world a hundred years ...hence was not so much a prediction as a polemic. Keynes was sharply critical of our means-ends confusion in valuing the instrumental as if it had more than ultimate value. Less well understood is his belief that the government must play a role in educating the public's aesthetic sensibility if we are not to fall for this "Benthamite heresy". Keynes humanistic motivations and his emphasis on public arts education are taken up here, with reference to the sorts of lives we live today and the sorts of lives that Keynes thought worth living. The failure of Keynes' vision to manifest itself is perhaps not so much an indictment of his speculative powers, but of our diminished sense of the value of cultural education. KEYWORDS: Keynes; Philosophy of Education; Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE); History of Philosophy; Socialism
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