Lucas and Sargent from After Keynesian Macroeconomics (1979):
For policy, the central fact is that Keynesian policy recommendations have no sounder basis, in a scientific sense, than recommendations of non-Keynesian economists or, for that matter, non-economists
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Robert Lucas from Tobin and Monetarism: A Review Article (1981):
Keynesian theory is in deep trouble, the deepest kind of trouble in which an applied body of theory can find itself: It appears to be giving seriously wrong answers to the most basic questions of macroeconomic policy.
Proponents of a class of models which promised 3 to 4 per cent unemployment to a society willing to tolerate annual inflation rates of 4 to 5 per cent have some explaining to do after a decade such as we have just come through.
A forecast error of this magnitude and central importance to policy has consequences, as well it should.
We got the high-inflation decade, and with it as clear-cut an experimental discrimination as macroeconomics is very likely to see, and Friedman and Phelps were right.
Haberler, Jacob Viner, Robertson, Pigou and Frank Knight pointed out in their reviews of the General Theory that it lacked originality, and presented old ideas often incorrectly in confusing new vocabularies that made the book difficult to read. These reviews are worth reading today such as this by Frank Knight:
Many of Mr. Keynes’s own doctrines are, as he would proudly admit, among the notorious fallacies to combat which has been considered a main function of the teaching of economics.
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