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In fact, Keynesians typically see unemployment as both too high on average and too variable, although they
know that rigorous theoretical justification for these positions is hard to come by. Keynesians also feel certain
that periods of recession or depression are economic maladies, not efficient market responses to unattractive
opportunities.
5. Many, but not all, Keynesians advocate activist stabilization policy to reduce the amplitude of the busi-
ness cycle, which they rank among the most important of all economic problems. Here Keynesians and mone-
tarists (and even some conservative Keynesians) part company by doubting either the efficacy of stabilization
policy or the wisdom of attempting it.
This does not mean that Keynesians advocate what used to be called fine-tuning-adjusting government
spending, taxes, and the money supply every few months to keep the economy at full employment. Almost all
economists, including most Keynesians, now believe that the government simply cannot know enough soon
enough to fine-tune successfully. Three lags make it unlikely that fine-tuning will work. First, there is a lag be-
tween the time that a change in policy requires and the time that the government recognizes this. Second, there
is a lag between when the government recognizes that a change in policy is required and when it takes action.
In the United States, this lag is often very long for fiscal policy because Congress and the administration must
first agree on most changes in spending and taxes. The third lag comes between the time that policy is changed
and when the changes affect the economy. This, too, can be many months. Yet many Keynesians still believe
that more modest goals for stabilization policy – coarse-tuning, if you will – are not only defensible, but sensi-
ble. For example, an economist need not have detailed quantitative knowledge of lags to prescribe a dose of ex-
pansionary monetary policy when the unemployment rate is 10 per cent or more – as it was in many leading
industrial countries in the eighties.
6. Finally, and even less unanimously, many Keynesians are more concerned about combating unemploy-
ment than about conquering inflation. They have concluded from the evidence that the costs of low inflation are
small. However, there are plenty of anti-inflation Keynesians. Most of the world's current and past central
bankers, for example, merit this title whether they like it or not. Needless to say, views on the relative impor-
tance of unemployment and inflation heavily influence the policy advice that economists give and that policy-
makers accept. Keynesians typically advocate more aggressively expansionist policies than non-Keynesians.
Keynesians' belief in aggressive government action to stabilize the economy is based on value judgments
and on the beliefs that a) macroeconomic fluctuations significantly reduce economic well-being, b) the gov-
ernment is knowledgeable and capable enough to improve upon the free market, and c) unemployment is a
more important problem than inflation.
The long, and to some extent, continuing battle between Keynesians and monetarists has been fought pri-
marily over b) and c).
In contrast, the briefer and more recent debate between Keynesians and new classical economists has been
fought primarily over a) and over the first three tenets of Keynesianism – tenets that the monetarists had ac-
cepted. New classicals believe that anticipated changes in the money supply do not affect real output; that mar-
kets, even the labor market, adjust quickly to eliminate shortages and surpluses; and that business cycles may
be efficient. For reasons that will be made clear below, I believe that the "objective" scientific evidence on
these matters points strongly in the Keynesian direction.
Before leaving the realm of definition, however, I must underscore several glaring and intentional omis-
sions.
First, I have said nothing about the rational expectations school of thought. Like Keynes himself, many
Keynesians doubt that school's view that people use all available information to form their expectations about
economic policy. Other Keynesians accept the view. But when it comes to the large issues with which I have
concerned myself, nothing much rides on whether or not expectations are rational. Rational expectations do not,
for example, preclude rigid prices. Stanford's John Taylor and MIT's Stanley Fischer have constructed rational
expectations models with sticky prices that are thoroughly Keynesian by my definition. I should note, though,
that some new classicals see rational expectations as much more fundamental to the debate.
The second omission is the hypothesis that there is a "natural rate" of unemployment in the long run. Prior
to 1970, Keynesians believed that the long-run level of unemployment depended on government policy, and
that the government could achieve a low unemployment rate by accepting a high but steady rate of inflation. In
the late sixties Milton Friedman, a monetarist, and Columbia's Edmund Phelps, a Keynesian, rejected the idea
of such a long-run trade-off on theoretical grounds. They argued that the only way the government could keep
unemployment below what they called the "natural rate" was with macroeconomic policies that would continu-
ously drive inflation higher and higher. In the long run, they argued, the unemployment rate could not be below
the natural rate. Shortly thereafter, Keynesians like Northwestern's Robert Gordon presented empirical evidence
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