David Laidler

This new edition builds a comprehensive picture of the microeconomic tools required to solve a wide range of problems by using an innovative combination of written, illustrative and mathematical analysis. It helps the reader to think like an economist - in particular demonstrating how individuals, firms and policy-makers decide their best course of action.

David Laidler is one of the leading scholars in the history of economic thought and macroeconomics. This important collection brings together nineteen of his essays on topics in the history of macroeconomics. It begins with a paper on Adam Smith and ends with a discussion of the implications of Newclassical economists' ideas on the role of economic ideas in conditioning agents' activities. Other chapters deal with the major themes developed by monetary economists in the intervening years. Two of the essays appear in their current form for the first time, and several others are reprinted from difficult-to-obtain sources. They should be of interest not just to historians of economic thought, but also to economists more generally.

Examining the emergence, in the inter-war years, of what came to be called ‘Keynesian macroeconomics’. This study accepts the novelty of the latter, as represented by the IS-LM model, which in various forms came to dominate the sub-discipline for three decades. It argues, however, that this model did not represent a radical change in economic thinking but rather an extremely selective synthesis of those which had permeated the preceding literature, including Keynes’s own contributions to it, not least the General Theory. Hence the book questions the appropriateness of thinking of this development as the outcome of a ‘Keynesian Revolution’ in economic thought, partly because the most radical aspects of Keynes’s own intended contribution were excluded from it, but mainly because IS-LM is better viewed as the end result of twenty years or more of intellectual development to which many others besides Keynes contributed.

Examining the emergence, in the inter-war years, of what came to be called ‘Keynesian macroeconomics’. This study accepts the novelty of the latter, as represented by the IS-LM model, which in various forms came to dominate the sub-discipline for three decades. It argues, however, that this model did not represent a radical change in economic thinking but rather an extremely selective synthesis of those which had permeated the preceding literature, including Keynes’s own contributions to it, not least the General Theory. Hence the book questions the appropriateness of thinking of this development as the outcome of a ‘Keynesian Revolution’ in economic thought, partly because the most radical aspects of Keynes’s own intended contribution were excluded from it, but mainly because IS-LM is better viewed as the end result of twenty years or more of intellectual development to which many others besides Keynes contributed.

Money and Macroeconomics is a significant collection of David Laidler's most important papers on the so-called 'monetarist counter-revolution'. This volume contains both published and unpublished examples of his influential contribution, detailing empirical work on the demand for money, the economics of inflation, the foundations of the 'buffer stock' approach to monetary theory, the monetarist critique of new classical economics and issues of economic policy. David Laidler has also prepared a personal memoir to accompany his volume which gives a revealing account of his academic career and influences, and places each essay in its original intellectual context. Money and Macroeconomics presents in one volume David Laidler's most important contributions to monetary economics. It will be invaluable to monetary and financial economists as well as policy makers and historians of economic thought.