Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…He certainly loved to play debater. That starts very early. He loves being part of the Cambridge Union Society. He loves debating conservatives in particular, in his early days. I think it’s impossible to separate Keynes the political activist from Keynes the economic analyst, and I don’t know that he would want us to separate those things, at least from this stage in history. Certainly, during his lifetime, he occasionally put on the hat of “I’m just looking at the numbers. This is just what the numbers say.” But he’s a philosopher first and an economist second. In a lot of ways, I think his economics are just this dressed-up mathematical justification for philosophical views that he’s been wrestling with on a deeper level, particularly when he’s at Cambridge. He’s embroiled in these debates with Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein and all of his friends in Bloomsbury about what constitutes a good life. I think that social vision stays with him over the course of his lifetime. The reason his economics keeps changing is because he’s trying to find some intellectual justification for that social vision, which is really paramount in his worldview and in his work. What should we make of the preface Keynes wrote for the German-language edition of The General Theory, where he basically says to the Nazis, “My ideas will work better under your system”? It’s not at all that I think Keynes was pro-Nazi. Clearly, he was not at all, but is that another example of Keynes, in a sense, being too flexible, even philosophically? Hayek never did that to Pinochet, right? Friedman didn’t. Well, what is the language? The language was something like, “I’m aware that in many respects, my economic system is easier to operate under an authoritarian government.” Something like that.…

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