Some Foreseeable Disasters of the Global Economy: The High Cost of Neglecting Keynes’s Approach

Abstract

The paper revisits some foreseeable disasters of the recent history of the global economy, from the consequences of the failed attempt to construct a disciplinary order based on the Washington Consensus paradigm, to the current global crisis, which dramatically showed the vulnerability of the Woods 2 order and contributed to the widespread adoption in Europe of austerity programs. We argue that the historical evolution of the international non-system since the collapse of the Bretton Woods regime can be regarded as the complete repudiation of the essence itself, and general philosophy, of Keynes’s international economics. We aim at demonstrating, conversely, that Keynes's international macroeconomics is the result of the development of an extremely powerful “complexity approach” to international economic relations, and that it still provides a mostly needed theoretical reference to construct, as Keynes himself would say, a sounder political economy between all nations.