Economics Beyond the Neoclassical Synthesis Rediscovering Keynes’s Enterprise

Abstract

This paper has two central themes. One is that to make sense of the results of work in mathematical economics over the past twenty years- the incredible richness of the models now being produced, the wide diversity of their policy implications and the evident failings of the welfare foundations of modern economics- requires an understanding of the enterprise of economics quite different from that of the pioneers of mathematical economics. The second theme is that the understanding of the enterprise of economics which Keynes evolved and practised is highly relevant to this new task of making sense of economics beyond the neoclassical synthesis. Keynes's conception of economics as a moral science, in which a wide variety of models are used as tools to guide practical judgement and the formulation of policy initiaves to achieve morally desirable goals, may have disappeared into the black hole of mathematics, but it is reappearing with new force out the other side.