> Can someone explain to me the salient differences between Bastard
> Keynesianism and the more "authentic" versions? do these differences have
> any real policy implications?
>
> Seth
I'll take a crack at that from the deep recesses of my memory, Seth. What I can tell you is only one part of the story, and in simplified version.
"Bastard Keynesians" is a term coined by Joan Robinson, writing in the 50s. Robinson was actually a student of Keynes in the 30s when he was developing the General Theory, and she always retained a sort of protective approach to the corpus of his thought. Hence her reaction when his work was distorted.
Keynes attacked the neoclassicals of his day most fundamentally by showing theirs was a static equilibrium theory, complete with automatic tendencies toward that equilibrium. What to do when the economy turned down? Nothing, they said. In the General Theory (he called it the General Theory because he argued that all of neoclassical theory was but a restricted, special case), Keynes wrote of the many fundamental problems left unadressed by neoclassical theory; e.g., disconnects between savings and investment such that you can't save your way to prosperity (the problems of Say's Law), the "liqidity trap" when interest rates got too low, and other such things that clearly showed some of the dissembling possibilities of unfettered capitalism. One way to summarize: Keynes added time to the neoclassical static model (see stuff by GLS Schackle and Robinson explaining this) and studied its effects.
According to Robinson (and she's right), first chance they got, the bastard Keynesians took time back out of the theory. They embraced superficial parts like deficit spending to correct short term problems of aggregate demand (so that Nixon could proclaim "we are all Keynesians now"--the extreme form of bastardization, of course; also the point of Doug's reference to the bastard Keynesian state). But they replaced the heart of Keynes' macro insights with static ISLM curves--you tweak the money supply here or savings there and poof! you're back on track toward equilibrated nirvana. In short, they are bastard Keynesians because they grabbed hold of a few trappings, and threw away the insights that call into question how capitalism functions.
Policy implications? His analysis led Keynes, a rather conservative fella, who e.g., had little use for Marx, to blurt out that, to deal with the problems he had shown, perhaps it was necessary to have social control of investment. Put another way, don't kid yourself that your are getting the heart of the problem when you debate the effects on growth of a tax cut vs. govt. spending.