Jeffrey Sachs: Today’s Challenges Go Beyond Keynes

The writer is director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

For more than 30 years, from the mid-1970s to 2008, Keynesian demand management was in intellectual eclipse. Yet it returned with the financial crisis to dominate the thinking of the Obama administration and much of the UK Labour party. It is time to reconsider the revival.

The rebound of Keynesianism, led in the US by Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary, Paul Krugman, the economist-columnist, and the US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, came with the belief that short-term fiscal and monetary expansion was needed to offset the collapse of the housing market.

The US policy choice has been four years of structural (cyclically adjusted) budget deficits of general government of 7 per cent of gross domestic product or more; interest rates near zero; another call by the White House for stimulus in 2013; and the Fed’s new policy to keep rates near zero until unemployment returns to 6.5 per cent. Since 2010, no European country has followed the US’s fiscal lead. However, the European Central Bank and Bank of England are not far behind the Fed on the monetary front.

We can’t know how successful (or otherwise) these policies have been because of the lack of convincing counterfactuals. But we should have serious doubts...