As the stock market crash of 1929
plunged the world into turmoil,
two men emerged with competing
claims on how to restore
balance to economies gone awry.
John Maynard Keynes, the mercurial
Cambridge economist, believed thatgovernment had a duty to spend when
others would not.
He met his opposite in a little-known
Austrian economics professor, FreidrichHayek, who considered attempts tointervene both pointless and potentially
dangerous.
The battle lines thus drawn, Keynesian
economics would dominate for decadesand coincide with an era of unprecedented
prosperity, but conservative economists
and political leaders would eventually
embrace and execute Hayek's contrary
vision.
From their first face-to-face encounter
to the heated arguments between theirardent disciples, Nicholas Wapshott hereunearths the contemporary relevance of
Keynes and Hayek, as present-day
arguments over the virtues of the free
market and government intervention rage
with the same ferocity
as they did in the 1930s.