JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES and Friedrich Hayek. The names conjure opposing poles of thought about making economic policy: Keynes is often held up as the flag bearer of vigorous government intervention in the markets, while Hayek is regarded as the champion of laissez-faire capitalism.
What these men actually thought — about the economy and each other — is more complicated, as Nicholas Wapshott demonstrates in “Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics” (W. W. Norton, $28.95). This lively book explores one of the most pressing economic questions of our time: To what extent should government intervene in markets? And in that search, it traces the interaction of the two men most responsible for the way we approach this question: the British economist Keynes and the Austrian economist Hayek.
Both men came of intellectual age in the aftermath of World War I. They lived through the boom of the 1920s and through the Great Depression and arrived at radically different views of the wisdom of letting free-market capitalism run its course.
Keynes concluded that markets would not automatically provide full employment and that during downturns there could be long periods of large-scale unemployment. He argued that it was the government’s duty to relieve the plight of the jobless by increasing aggregate demand for goods and services.
Mr. Wapshott, a Reuters contributing columnist and a former senior editor at The Times of London, skillfully reconstructs the context in which Keynes formulated his theory. During the 1920s, Britain endured persistently high unemployment. Successive policy makers, worried about rising expenditures and falling tax revenue, ignored Keynes’s calls for public spending, setting off what he called a “vicious circle.”
“We do nothing because we have not the money,” Keynes said in 1930 to a government committee investigating the causes of the economic crisis. “But it is precisely because we do not do anything that we have not the money.” With the unemployment rate now at 9.1 percent, I gulped long and hard as I read these pages.
Hayek came to a very different conclusion. After serving in World War I, he found his beloved Vienna “devastated and its people’s confidence broken,” Mr. Wapshott writes. During the ensuing decade, hyperinflation pummeled the Austrian economy, melting away the savings of millions of people.
This experience, Mr. Wapshott argues, hardened Hayek “against those who advocated inflation as a cure for a broken economy.” And he came to believe “that those who advocated large-scale public spending programs to cure unemployment were inviting not
just uncontrollable inflation but political tyranny.”
Thus, the author writes, the battle lines between Keynes and Hayek were drawn. Yet it was a duel characterized by mutual respect. Keynes, for example, shared Hayek’s distrust of socialism, while Hayek conceded that in the case of chronic unemployment, planning might play a role without leading to oppression.
But it was still a duel. In 1936, Keynes published “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,” which took on classical economics and people like Hayek who subscribed to its tenets. Keynes’s targets included several long-accepted ideas: that employment levels are determined by the price of labor, that supply creates its own demand and that savings automatically translate into investment.
Keynes didn’t expect that his findings would lead to an infringement of personal liberty. Instead, the author writes, Keynes believed “that a prosperous society in which everyone is employed was the surest way of maintaining the independence of thought and action he considered the guarantor of true democracy.”
Hayek did not publicly detail any criticisms of “The General Theory.” But in 1944, he brought out “The Road to Serfdom,” which has become a libertarian classic. Hayek aimed to expose socialism and fascism as twin evils, warning of the potential dangers of central economic planning in the aftermath of World War II.
“It is Germany whose fate we are in some danger of repeating,” Hayek wrote.
Keynes was swift to respond, reminding Hayek that the rise of National Socialism was fueled not by big government but by mass unemployment and a failure of capitalism.
The last third of the book focuses on the economists’ legacies. Keynesian ideas were ascendant in the postwar era, but by the mid-1970s, with the onset of low economic growth and inflation — a combination previously deemed impossible — Mr. Wapshott says it seemed that “the Age of Keynes was in its death throes.”
For the next few decades, Hayek’s ideas and proponents like Milton Friedman, who argued that monetary and not fiscal policy was the major tool for managing the economy, gained steady influence. In the author’s view, Hayek’s influence was seen in the 1994 “Contract With America,” the Republican pledge to shrink big government; in the later balanced-budget legislation of President Bill Clinton; and in the operations of the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan.
In 2007, the subprime mortgage market began to implode, suggesting that “the decades-long experiment in allowing barely restrained markets to generate growth and prosperity had failed,” Mr. Wapshott writes. A rapid return to Keynesian prescriptions occurred in the next two years, culminating in President Obama’s $787 billion recovery
program in early 2009.
By then, however, the old ideological struggle had re-emerged. “Not a single Republican voted for the stimulus,” the book notes. “And with barely a semi-quaver rest, the old Keynes-Hayek arguments broke out again. It was as if the intervening 80 years had not taken place.”
Mr. Wapshott has written an important book. It is compelling not only as a history of two distinctive thinkers and their influence, but also as a narrative of political decision-making and its underlying priorities. At times, it seems that the author is as much under Keynes’s charismatic thrall as some of his disciples; it would have been even stronger with more attention to Hayek and the evolution of his thought.
But these are quibbles. Underlying Mr. Wapshott’s analysis are vital questions for this moment in American history: What kind of society do we want? How much faith do we have in individual agency? And what do we owe to our fellow citizens and our collective future? As Mr. Wapshott writes, these very questions animated Keynes and Hayek during a time when the stakes were also very high.
【纽约时报书评】凯恩斯vs哈耶克——两位决斗的经济学家的故事
约翰•梅纳德•凯恩斯和弗里德里希•哈耶克，制定经济政策时，这两个名字代表相反的两极：凯恩斯通常被视为主张政府对市场进行有力干预的扛旗者，而哈耶克则被认为是自由放任资本主义的拥护者。
正如尼古拉斯•沃博少特在他的新书《凯恩斯哈耶克：决定现代经济的冲突》(W. W. Norton出版，28.95美元)中表明的，这两个人的真正想法是什么——不管是对于经济还是对于彼此——都是更复杂的。这本书生动地探索了我们时代最亟待解决的经济问题之一：政府对市场的干预应该保持在什么样的程度范围内？在探寻这一问题时，本书追述了最能影响我们看待这一问题的视角的两个人：英国经济学家凯恩斯与奥地利经济学家哈耶克。
这两人都出现在一战后的智性时代，他们都经历了二十世纪20年代的经济繁荣，也经历了大萧条时期，但在如何让自由市场资本主义自行运转的问题上，他们却得出了根本不同的观点。
凯恩斯断定，市场不会自动提供充分的就业，在低迷时期，就有可能产生长期的大规模的失业问题。他认为，通过增加商品和服务的总需求来缓解失业困境是政府的责任。
沃博少特先生是路透社的专栏撰稿者，也是伦敦《泰晤士报》的前高级记者。在这本书中，他娴熟地重现了凯恩斯形成自己理论时的社会背景。二十世纪20年代，英国经受着持续的高失业率，一连串的政策制定者担心消费上升，税收收入下降，忽略了凯恩斯对公共支出的号召，从而形成了他所谓的“恶性循环”。
1930年，凯恩斯对调查造成经济危机原因的一个政府委员会说，“我们什么都不做，因为我们没有钱。”“但也正是因为我们什么都不做，所以我们没有钱。”现在的失业率是9.1%，读到这些话时，我吞了口口水，感觉难以下咽。
哈耶克得出了截然不同的结论。在一战服役结束后，他发现他心爱的维也纳“满目疮痍，人们的信心破碎了” 沃博少特先生这样写道。在接下来的十年里，恶性通货膨胀给奥地利的经济以重创，将上百万人民的积蓄消融殆尽。
沃博少特先生认为，这样的经历让哈耶克坚决地“反对主张通货膨胀可以治愈毁坏的经济状况的人们”。并且，他开始相信，“那些提倡通过大规模的公共支出项目来疗救失业状况的人们不仅导致了不可控制的通货膨胀，还也引发了暴政。”
因此，作者写道，凯恩斯和哈耶克的战争打个平局。但这是一种以相互尊重为特色的决斗。例如，凯恩斯和哈耶克一样，也不相信社会主义。哈耶克也承认，在长期失业的情况下，在不导致压迫的前提下，计划经济会起到一定作用。
但这仍是一种决斗。1936年，凯恩斯出版了《就业、利息和货币通论》一书，针对的就是古典经济学，以及像哈耶克这样拥护其教义的人。凯恩斯的攻击目标包括许多长期为人所接受的观点：劳动力价格决定就业水平，供给自身会创造需求，储蓄自动会转变成投资。
凯恩斯没有料到他的发现会导致对个人自由的侵犯。相反，作者写道，凯恩斯相信，“一个每个人都能就业的繁荣兴旺的社会无疑是保持思想独立，行动独立的最可靠的方式，而且他认为思想与行动的独立正是真正民主的保证。”
哈耶克没有公开发表任何对《通论》的批评，但在1944年，他出版了《通往奴役之路》，这已成为自由主义的经典之作。哈耶克旨在揭露社会主义和法西斯主义这两种孪生的罪恶，并对二战后中央计划经济体制的潜在风险提出警告。
“我们存在着重蹈德国命运的危险”，哈耶克写道。
凯恩斯的回应很迅速，他提醒哈耶克，国家社会主义不是由庞大政府，而是由大量失业和资本主义的失败引发的。
本书的最后三分之一部分关注的是这两位经济学家的遗产，凯恩斯主义在战后时期越来越占优势，但是到了二十世纪70年代中期，随着经济增长的降低以及通货膨胀的爆发——之前认为这两种情况是不可能同时发生的——沃博少特先生认为，这看起来是“凯恩斯时代的垂死挣扎”。
在接下来的几十年中，哈耶克的观点以及像费里德曼这样对他表示支持的人们，即认为是货币政策而不是财政政策，才是管理经济的主要工具的人的思想获得了稳定的影响力。在作者看来，哈耶克的影响力可以在1994年的“美国合约”，共和党保证缩小庞大政府中看出来，在后来比尔•克林顿总统的平衡预算立法，在阿兰•格林斯番领导下的美联储操作过程中也有所显示。
2007年，次级抵押贷款市场开始内爆，表明“仅仅让几乎不受约束的市场自行实现增长与繁荣的长达几十年的实验失败了。” 沃博少特先生这样写道。接下来的两年中，又迅速地返回到了凯恩斯主义，并在奥巴马总统2009年早期颁布的价值7870亿美元的恢复项目中达到高潮。
“那个时候，古老的意识形态斗争又重新出现了。”本书注意到，“没有一个共和党人支持刺激政策”。“几乎没有片刻休息，古老的凯恩斯哈耶克之争又爆发了，就像80年的间隔从未有过一样。”
沃博少特先生写了一本重要的书，其引人注目不仅在于描述了两位杰出思想家及其影响的历史，也在于叙述了政治决策过程以及对其基础的轻重权衡。有时，貌似作者也像凯恩斯的门徒一样，被其思想迷住了，本书要是多关注一下哈耶克及其思想演变，无疑会更有说服力。
但这些都是吹毛求疵。沃博少特先生分析的是建立在此刻美国历史上的关键问题：我们想要什么样的社会？我们对个人决定权有多少信心？我们对自己的市民同胞和集体的未来有什么责任？正如沃博少特先生所写，正是同样的问题激发了凯恩斯和哈耶克的思想，这些问题在他们的时代和我们的时代同样利害攸关。
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