Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

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Today is May 14, 2012, and my guest is Lawrence H. White of George Mason University. His latest

book is The Clash of Economic Ideas, the great policy debates and experiments of the last 100

years. Larry, welcome back to Econ Talk.

Thanks, Russ. Good to be back.

Our topic for today is your book, The Clash of Economic Ideas. It's a real tour de force. It

covers, as promised, the major policy debates of the last century. The economists who were involved,

and it dips back into the past to talk about those economists' predecessors, including Adam Smith,

they've Ricardo, Mill, Bentham, Say, Marks, Malthus, and so on. The writing is incredibly clear.

You'll learn a lot if you read this book. I learned a lot. And you begin with not surprisingly

Keynes and Hayek. What I found most interesting is your revisionist take on two seemingly true claims

that Keynes was the first macroeconomist and that everyone before Keynes was pretty much less

a fair. You take a different approach to both those claims. Explain.

Yes, I'm able to use Paul Krugman as the foil, having made both those claims.

He's not the only one, though.

He's certainly not the only one. I'm sure he learned it from someone else.

Right, Robert Skodelski Keynes' biographer suggests that Keynes invented macroeconomics.

So if we define macroeconomics as the study of business cycles, which seems like a natural definition,

...