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for Friedman's and Phelps's view. Since about 1972 Keynesians have integrated the "natural rate" of unem-
ployment into their thinking. So the natural rate hypothesis played essentially no role in the intellectual ferment
of the 1975 – 85 period.
Third, I have ignored the choice between monetary and fiscal policy as the preferred instrument of stabili-
zation policy. Economists differ about this and occasionally change sides. By my definition, however, it is per-
fectly possible to be a Keynesian and still believe either that responsibility for stabilization policy should, in
principle, be ceded to the monetary authority or that it is, in practice, so ceded.
Keynesian theory was much denigrated in academic circles from the midseventies until the mideighties. It
has staged a strong comeback since then, however. The main reason appears to be that Keynesian economics
was better able to explain the economic events of the seventies and eighties than its principal intellectual com-
petitor, new classical economics.
True to its classical roots, new classical theory emphasizes the ability of a market economy to cure reces-
sions by downward adjustments in wages and prices. The new classical economists of the midseventies attrib-
uted economic downturns to people's misperceptions about what was happening to relative prices (such as real
wages). Misperceptions would arise, they argued, if people did not know the current price level or inflation rate.
But such misperceptions should be fleeting and surely cannot be large in societies in which price indexes are
published monthly and the typical monthly inflation rate is under 1 per cent. Therefore, economic downturns,
by the new classical view, should be mild and brief. Yet during the eighties most of the world's industrial
economies endured deep and long recessions. Keynesian economics may be theoretically untidy, but it certainly
is a theory that predicts periods of persistent, involuntary unemployment.
According to new classical theory, a correctly perceived decrease in the growth of the money supply
should have only small effects, if any, on real output. Yet when the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England
announced that monetary policy would be tightened to fight inflation, and then made good on their promises,
severe recessions followed in each country. New classicals might claim that the tightening was unanticipated
(because people did not believe what the monetary authorities said). Perhaps it was in part. But surely the broad
contours of the restrictive policies were anticipated, or at least correctly perceived as they unfolded. Old-
fashioned Keynesian theory, which says that any monetary restriction is contractionary because firms and indi-
viduals are locked into fixed-price contracts, not inflation-adjusted ones, seems more consistent with actual
events.
An offshoot of new classical theory formulated by Harvard's Robert Barro is the idea of debt neutrality.
Barro argues that inflation, unemployment, real GNP, and real national saving should not be affected by
whether the government finances its spending with high taxes and low deficits or with low taxes and high defi-
cits. Because people are rational, he argues, they will correctly perceive that low taxes and high deficits today
must mean higher future taxes for them and their heirs. They will, Barro argues, cut consumption and increase
their saving by one dollar for each dollar increase in future tax liabilities. Thus, a rise in private saving should
offset any increase in the government's deficit. Naive Keynesian analysis, by contrast, sees an increased deficit,
with government spending held constant, as an increase in aggregate demand. If, as happened in the United
States, the stimulus to demand is nullified by contractionary monetary policy, real interest rates should rise
strongly. There is no reason, in the Keynesian view, to expect the private saving rate to rise.
The massive U.S. tax cuts between 1981 and 1984 provided something approximating a laboratory test of
these alternative views. What happened? The private saving rate did not rise. Real interest rates soared, even
though a surprisingly large part of the shock was absorbed by exchange rates rather than by interest rates. With
fiscal stimulus offset by monetary contraction, real GNP growth was approximately unaffected; it grew at about
the same rate as it had in the recent past. Again, this all seems more consistent with Keynesian than with new
classical theory.
Finally, there was the European depression of the eighties, which was the worst since the depression of the
thirties. The Keynesian explanation is straightforward. Governments, led by the British and German central
banks, decided to fight inflation with highly restrictive monetary and fiscal policies. The anti-inflation crusade
was strengthened by the European Monetary System, which, in effect, spread the stern German monetary policy
all over Europe. The new classical school has no comparable explanation. New classicals and conservative
economists in general, argue that European governments interfere more heavily in labor markets (with high un-
employment benefits, for example, and restrictions on firing workers). But most of these interferences were in
place in the early seventies, when unemployment was extremely low.
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