Keynesianism, if you add its flexible, muscular form during the Depression to its more rigid postwar version, lasted 45 years.

One of the reasons I'm such a huge fan of Keynes is because people in economics say this to me all the time, and they don't even realize the incredible degree to which this is false.  Everyone is a Keynesian, today -- more so than ever before.  Even people who have never studied economics, and who know nothing about economics, are Keynesians.  When a Wall Streeter says, "Consumer confidence is slipping, and that poses a problem," he's demonstrating that he is a Keynesian, whether he realizes it or not.  When a so-called "Supply-Sider" tells you that he's going to cut taxes, so that it will put money in your pocket to spend, he's being a Keynesian.

When citizens say that WWII ended the Great Depression, what they don't recognize is that WWII, from the standpoint of economics, was simply a giant worker program.

(As I've said in the past, Keynes had Supply-Side economics figured out when Artie Laffer was still in diapers, and he had Monetarism figured out while Milton Friedman was still writing his dissertation.  A Monetary History of the US is simply an extension of Keynes's A Tract on Monetary Reform.)

When the media talkingheads and the citizens say that the rebuilding of New Orleans will provide a small boost to the economy -- as an alleged anti-Keynesian professor of mine said last year -- they're talking about Keynesian principles, even when they refuse to admit it.  When Bill Clinton said he was going to raise taxes in order to balance the budget, as the economy left the recovery phase and began its expansion, so that pressure on interest rates would be relieved, he was, in an odd way, being a Keynesian.

So, while the rest of the article is interesting (though wrong, in my opinion), Saul has a very poor understanding of just how dominant Keynes has become in our daily lives.  I could fill, I'm guessing, two diaries with examples of his ideas at work in today's world.  What's so interesting about the man, to me, is that he was able to destroy Classicalist economics in a matter of twenty pages at the beginning of The General Theory.  And the Classicalists, along with the Austrians, have hobbled along ever since.

Saul, like most others who make that statement, has probably never read Keynes -- or, if he has, he probably only read Book I of The General Theory, and was frustrated by the fact that he had no idea as to what Keynes was talking about.  If you want to know just how wrong Saul is, read this and (as Krugman says) marvel.

I'll respond to the rest later.  Need coffee first.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.