Statement of the Co-Editors

Statement of the Co-EditorsEconomics and the economic crisis: the case for change It is widely recognized that economic crises can sometimes trigger enormous change, with regard to both economic theory and the politics of governance.Today, the global economy is struggling with the fall-out from the financial crash of 2008 and the Great Recession of 2007-2009.The economic crisis that these events have generated, combined with the failure of the mainstream economics profession, has again put the question of change on the table.The economics profession stands significantly discredited owing to its failure to foresee the recession and the financial crash, its repeated over-optimistic forecasts of rapid recovery, and the lack of plausibility surrounding its attempts to explain events.Reasonable people do not expect economists to predict the daily movements of the stock market, but they do expect them to anticipate and explain major imminent economic developments.On that score, the profession failed catastrophically, revealing fundamental theoretical inadequacies.This intellectual failure has prompted us to launch the Review of Keynesian Economics.At a time of journal proliferation, some may wonder about the need for another journal.We would respond there is a proliferation of journals, but that proliferation is essentially within one intellectual paradigm.As such, it obscures the fact that the range of theoretical inquiry is actually very narrow.A journal devoted to Keynesian economics is therefore needed, both to correct this narrowness and because events have once again confirmed the profound relevance of Keynesian theory.Reflection upon the intellectual history of macroeconomics over the past 75 years can help to understand the current predicament and need for this new journal.That history traces an arc, which first saw the eclipse of classical macroeconomics by Keynesian macroeconomics, and then saw the eclipse of Keynesian macroeconomics by a revived and re-tooled classical macroeconomics.The crisis associated with the Great Depression of the 1930s inspired John Maynard Keynes to write The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, a book that explained the persistence of unemployment in monetary economies.Keynes's theory had enormous influence both inside and outside the academy, and his ideas on the importance of effective demand triggered a remaking of macroeconomics that saw Keynesian theory displace classical macroeconomic theory.That displacement was driven by the failure of classical theory to account for the Depression and the corresponding explanatory success of Keynesian theory.Moreover, not only did Keynesian theory provide an explanatory framework, it also offered practical policy recommendations.After World War II, the Keynesian theoretical revolution inspired new policy thinking that contributed to a 25-year period of unprecedented prosperity, now widely referred to as 'The Golden Age' of capitalism or 'The Age of Keynes'.From 1945 to the early 1970s, the global economy witnessed an unparalleled period of prosperity that came to an end with the collapse of Bretton Woods (1971), the first oil crisis (1973) and the stock market crash of 1973-74.During this period of almost

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