Clearing the Backlog - May 10, 2021

• The Wrath of Corleone 
• Author: Noah Millman
• Site: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
• Summary: An overwrought analysis of the Godfather trilogy.  
• The Keynesian Revolution
  
• Author: Jonathan Kirshner
• Site: Boston Review
• Summary: Book review of new biography of Keynes: "The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes" by Zachary D. Carter
• Quotes:
• The Great War shattered the illusion that civilization was secure—and much of Keynes’s efforts in the three decades that followed were designed to save society from dystopias looming in the wings, particularly in the varied forms of authoritarian collectivism.
• Carter’s Keynes is “the last of the enlightenment intellectuals who pursued political theory, economics, and ethics as a unified design.” To approach Keynes’s economics innocent of such an understanding is to miss much, if not everything. 
• Essentially, mainstream postwar Keynesianism was a tamed and housebroken interpretation of selected parts of the General Theory. For Keynes the free market was often dysfunctional, and the economy an unpredictable and occasionally dangerous beast, necessitating guidance by adroit improvisation. As domesticated by postwar economists, Keynesianism instead assumed highly functional markets that were more like automotive engines that benefited from occasional fine-tuning, which could be accomplished by a deploying a few standard, reliable tools.
• Paul Samuelson would emerge as perhaps the most influential (and representative) of a new generation of postwar “Keynesian” economists; he developed mathematical models of economics that derived directly from Newtonian physics. Keynes would likely have been aghast.
• The young Americans were building on John Hicks’s earlier attempt to simplify the Keynesian revolution, and reconcile it with elements of the old orthodoxy. As Carter observes, however, Keynes had in fact “presented a conceptual framework totally incompatible with Hicks’ project.” Keynes’s student Joan Robinson labeled such efforts “bastard Keynesianism.” But the bastards won.
• ...there is a straight line to be drawn from the blunders of American “Keynesianism” in the 1960s to the rise of more conservatively oriented economic theories in the 1980s and subsequently a broad consensus in macroeconomic theory that was permissive of the catastrophic anti-Keynesian liberation of finance that followed.
• Impressions: An interesting and well-written review.  I'm intrigued by the book, the subject, and the author of the review.
• Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces by Laura Tunbridge – review
  
• Author: Fiona Maddocks
• Site: The Guardian
• Summary: Book review of "Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces" by Laura Tunbridge - a short and superficial review of a short and superficial book.