The economic crisis that began in 2007 and still lingers has invited comparison with the Great Depression of the 1930s. It has also generated renewed interest in Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s explanation of the latter as mainly the consequence of the Fed’s failure as a lender of last...

The first of these essays was written for a happy occasion – my acceptance of honorary membership in the European Society for the History of Economic Thought. The second marked an altogether sadder event - the death of Mark Blaug. Though at first sight their topics are very different, both in...

Harry Johnson’s 1971 ideas about the factors affecting the success of the Keynesian Revolution and the Monetarist Counter-revolution are summarised and extended to the analysis of the Rational Expectations - New Classical (RE-NC) Revolution. It is then argued that, whereas Monetarism brought...