Word: lekachman
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...constantly questioned and condemned ever since that absent-minded Scots professor Adam Smith, another revolutionary of 1776, enunciated its basic philosophy. But today's doubts are deeper and the assaults more virulent. They come not only from capitalism's old critics but from its longtime champions. Leftist Economist Robert Lekachman of the City University of New York declares: "The central economic fact of our day is the declining vitality and élan of capitalism and capitalists." And Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca also says: "Free enterprise has gone to hell...
...been said that we are all Keynesians now," writes Robert Lekachman, borrowing the heading of TIME'S cover story (Dec. 31) on the late John Maynard Keynes. Now that Keynes has been embraced by politicians and popularized by journalists, the academicians are eager to assess again the ideas of the 20th century's most influential economist. Lekachman, head of the economics department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is the first American to analyze at book length Keynes's life and work and the impact of his thinking on contemporary times...
...Years of Gospel. Lekachman retells the major elements in the development of a genius: the patrician upbringing, the early triumphs at Eton and Cambridge, the cocksure rise in the British Treasury, the friendships with Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, the prolific outpouring of books, each more imaginative and important than the last. The climax, of course, was The General Theory, published in 1936, which argued heretically that economic cycles could be tamed and unemployment and inflation defeated by conscious government manipulation of national budgets, taxes and interest rates. In sum: man could control his economic fate...
Actually, the story of Keynes, who died in 1946, has been told earlier and better by such economists as Sir Roy Harrod, Alvin Hansen, Seymour Harris, Joseph Schumpeter, Robert Heilbroner and John Kenneth Galbraith. Where Lekachman differs from them is in his emphasis on Keynes's repeal...
Liberal Intervention. Speculating on what Keynes would have prescribed for the 1960s, Lekachman does not echo the fierce individualist from Cambridge, England, but the contemporary critic from Cambridge, Mass.-John Kenneth Galbraith. Faulting everything from "the looming menace of automation" to "the dubious or negative social value of advertising," Lekachman is angry with America's "frequently crude and crass material culture" and somehow concludes that the Great Society programs have "powerful tendencies to favor the prosperous...