The basis for Keyness success: why was Keynes able to succeed?

This chapter delves more deeply into the reasons for Keynes’s success in so rapidly converting the profession into a macroeconomic theory that revolved around aggregate demand. Of major importance was not just what was being said, but who was saying it. Keynes was possibly the single most respected economic authority of his time as far as the non-economist public was concerned. His judgements carried enormous weight with the public but also among policy makers. Also crucial to Keynes’s success was the simplicity of the Keynesian model that made it easy for both policy makers and the community to fathom, or to believe they had fathomed, the intricacies of economic theory and policy. Both the diagrammatic approaches introduced by Hicks and Samuelson helped promote clarity to the theory that had been developed by Keynes, although whether they were a correct interpretation of what Keynes had meant remains debatable, and more importantly, whether they added a deeper understanding of how an economy operates is absolutely denied. The development of the national accounts along Keynesian lines also further helped establish Keynesian theory among policy makers and with the public in general. It was also much easier to explain in a classroom setting, which helped spread the Keynesian model far and wide.