Richard Posner reviews Keynes and his masterwork:
Baffled by the profession's disarray, I decided I had better read The General Theory. Having done so, I have concluded that, despite its antiquity, it is the best guide we have to the crisis. And I am not alone in this judgment. Robert Skidelsky, the author of a superb three-volume biography of Keynes, is coming out with a book titled Keynes: The Return of the Master, in which he explains how Keynes differed from his predecessors, the "classical economists," and his successors, the "new classical economists" and the "new Keynesians"--and points out that the new Keynesians jettisoned the most important parts of Keynes's theory because they do not lend themselves to the mathematization beloved of modern economists.
[…] Keynes was the greatest economist of the twentieth century. To expel him from the profession is to confirm the worst prejudices of present-day economists by embracing their bobtailed conception of their field. […] Keynes wanted to be realistic about decision-making rather than explore how far an economist could get by assuming that people really do base decisions on some approximation to cost-benefit analysis.
