The Death of Keynes: Supply-Side Economics

My economics education began 21 years ago at Oxford, when my tutor dropped Samuelson’s uncomfortably heavy textbook in my lap and instructed me to return the following week, having written an essay entitled “What Is Money?” Samuelson turned out not to be very illuminating on the subject, 1 felt. For further enlightenment, I examined the few coins in my pocket, but with the gnawing suspicion that my tutor had something rather more abstract in mind—otherwise, what was I doing at a university?

Then I attended an economics lecture, my first and I fear my last. I sat in the midst of a crowd of scruffy freshmen, and we were straightaway introduced to the mysteries of national income. My own income, I knew, was zero, as no doubt was that of most of my fellow students. Apparently national income was everyone’s income added up: a summation leading to yet another abstraction—an aggregation, precariously computed and seemingly irrelevant, but for some reason of tremendous importance to Oxford dons. I remember learning at this lecture that unpaid housewives unjustly depress the national income figures. What about unpaid students, I wondered.

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Tom Bethell

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My economics education began 21 years ago at Oxford, when my tutor dropped Samuelson’s uncomfortably heavy textbook in my lap and instructed me to return the following week, having written an essay entitled “What Is Money?” Samuelson turned out not to be very illuminating on the subject, 1 felt. For further enlightenment, I examined the few coins in my pocket, but with the gnawing suspicion that my tutor had something rather more abstract in mind—otherwise, what was I doing at a university?

Then I attended an economics lecture, my first and I fear my last. I sat in the midst of a crowd of scruffy freshmen, and we were straightaway introduced to the mysteries of national income. My own income, I knew, was zero, as no doubt was that of most of my fellow students. Apparently national income was everyone’s income added up: a summation leading to yet another abstraction—an aggregation, precariously computed and seemingly irrelevant, but for some reason of tremendous importance to Oxford dons. I remember learning at this lecture that unpaid housewives unjustly depress the national income figures. What about unpaid students, I wondered.