> Doug wrote:
>
> > This is related to the argument Michael Perelman makes in his book on
> > Keynes: the softening of competition allowed by the (bastard)
> > Keynesian state gave rise to a sloppiness among capitalists.
> >
> >
> Can someone explain to me the salient differences between Bastard
>Keynesianism and the more "authentic" versions? do these differences have
>any real policy implications?
Several others have answered this question. I'd say the major differences between the bastards and the posties is that the bastards believe that with a bit of policy tweaking, capitalism can be made to approach stability and plenitude, while the posties believe that uncertainty, volatile sentiment, and financial instability requires more heroic interventions. Politically, most posties are to the left of the bastards, but not always; Paul Davidson, the editor of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics (no hyphen, Davidson insists), is very anti-socialist and anti-union even. Several of them have fallen under the sway of the speculator and monetary crank Warren Mosler, who believes the government could just print money instead of taxing people, or some such incomprehensible nonsense.
Post-Keynesians say that the bastards banalized Keynes, but Mark Blaug has a point when he says, in Economic Theory in Retrospect:
"Although Clower and Leijonhufvud have undoubtedly marked out a promising new line of advance in macroeconomics, it is not at all obvious that they are justified in reading these ideas into the works of Keynes. On rereading the The General Theory, one is struck by how much of what Keynes says does indeed resemble the supposedly vulgar interpretation of the Hicks-Hansen IS-LM apparatus or what Leijonhufvud calls the 'income-expenditure theory'. If Keynes was really analysing the problems of disequilibrium, why did he insist again and again on the possibility of 'unemployment equilibrium'? Why did he invoke such equilibrium conditions as the equality of the wage rate and the marginal product of labour in defining the concept of 'involuntary unemployment' and the equality of the marginal efficiency of capital and the rate of interest in stipulating the demand for investment? And why, on receipt of a personal copy of Hicks's 'Mr. Keynes and the "Classics"', the fons et origo of the standard interpretation, did Keynes find that he had 'next to nothing to say by way of criticism'?"
Keynes said pretty much the same about Hayek's Road to Serfdom, too.
Doug