Reception
Editor John Chamberlain reviewed The Failure of the "New Economics" in The Freeman, and in light of its controversial, heterodox nature titled his article, They’ll Never Hear the End of It, writing:
| “ | Mr. Hazlitt takes up the General Theory line by line and paragraph by paragraph, discovering scores of errors on almost every page. Not only does he kill Keynes; he cuts the corpse up into little pieces and stamps each little piece into the earth. The performance is awe-inspiring, masterly, irrefutable — and a little grisly. At times one almost feels sorry for the victim. But, since Keynesian doctrines have created so much misery in the world, any sympathy is misplaced. Hazlitt’s job had to be done. | ” |
Economist Ludwig von Mises called it "a devastating criticism of the Keynesian doctrines."
Reviewer Joseph McKenna comments that Hazlitt is "grossly unfair" in comparing Keynes' statements of facts to historical events more recent than the General Theory, and that Hazlitt rejects mathematical formulations and aggregation as imperfect, while the question is, "whether the approximation is sufficiently accurate to add anything to our understanding."
Read more about this topic: The Failure Of The New Economics
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