We Are All Keynesians Again

Why Ben Bernanke isn’t listening to Robert Samuelson.

By James K. Galbraith

The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence
by Robert J. Samuelson
Random House, 299 pp.

The heroes of Robert J. Samuelson’s The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence, a reflection on the troubles of the 1970s, are Paul Volcker, Federal Reserve chairman from 1979 to 1987, and Ronald Reagan, U.S. president from 1981 to 1989. The goats are the British economist John Maynard Keynes, dead since 1946, and his followers, especially the late John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006), the father of this reviewer. Galbraith père stands in here for a raft of postwar Keynesians whose names appear in the book only briefly, especially Paul Samuelson (no relation to the author), James Tobin, and Robert Solow—all Nobel Prize winners, and the real architects of the Keynesian consensus of those years.