Friday, November 23, 2007

Axel Leijonhufvud on Life Among the Econ

By: Axel Leijonhufvud
Axel Leijonhufvud made an enormous impact on macroeconomics in the late 1960s with the publication of his book On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes: A Study of Monetary Economics (1968). In this famous book, Leijonhufvud argued that the standard neoclassical synthesis (Hicks–Hansen IS-LM) interpretation of the General Theory totally misunderstood and misinterpreted Keynes. However, during the 1970's, interest in Keynes and Keynesian models waned as new classical equilibrium models became all the rage. Nevertheless, Leijonhufvud, from a position outside the mainstream, continued his research into problems of unemployment, business cycles, and inflation—issues that from his perspective are problems of coordination failure in complex dynamical systems. Axel Leijonhufvud is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, and, since 1995, Professor of Monetary Economics at the University of Trento, Italy.

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