Consensus, Dissensus and Economic Ideas: Economic Crisis and the Rise and Fall of Keynesianism – with John Quiggin

Henry Farrell and John Quiggin (2017), “Consensus, Dissensus and Economic Ideas: Economic Crisis and the Rise and Fall of Keynesianism,” International Studies Quarterly,61,1:269-283. Subsequent subject of an ISQ Symposium, featuring Paul Krugman, Elizabeth Berman, Stephen Nelson and Andrew Baker, with a response from the authors.

During the recent economic crisis, Keynesian ideas about fiscal stimulus briefly seemed to form the basis of a new expert consensus about how to deal with demand shocks. However, this apparent consensus soon collapsed into a continuing dissensus, with important consequences for policy. Neither conventional bargaining accounts nor existing theories of the role of ideas in policy outcomes easily explain the arc of international responses to the Great Recession. In this article, we propose that sociological arguments about professions, in conjunction with those about spaces of political contention as ecologies, provide a better understanding of the puzzle of Keynesianism’s rise and decline. The internal dynamics of prestige and status within the profession of economics intersected with policy arguments between states so as to make macroeconomic policy a “hinge” issue, over which coalitions in both ecologies contended. This explains how Keynesian economists and political actors worked together in the first phase of the crisis to advocate for and implement fiscal stimulus. It also explains why aggrieved policy actors, who did not favor stimulus, could help disrupt the apparent consensus in the second phase of the crisis by promoting the views of dissident economists.

Read the full article here

Other Writing:

Essay

The Dangers of Moving All of Democracy Online with Marion Fourcade

Governments around the world are struggling to deal with the public health and economic challenges of coronavirus. While many have pointed to how authoritarian regimes exacerbated the pandemic, we’ve so far paid dangerously little attention to coronavirus’s challenge to democracy. Access the full article here.
Read Article
Essay

Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions

In 2008, Paul Graham mused about the cultural differences between great US cities. Three years earlier, Graham had co-founded Y Combinator, a “startup accelerator” that would come to epitomize Silicon Valley — and would move there in 2009. But at the time Graham was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which, as he saw it, sent a different message ...
Read Article