This rap anthem featuring 20th century economists Friedrich August Hayek and John Maynard Keynes neatly encapsulates the ideological gulf between those who advocate maintaining a debt-fuelled stimulus until economic recovery is assured, and those who are leary of such reckless interventionism, preferring to make public sector cutbacks to address sovereign debt overhangs.
Or as the two stars of this video proclaim, those who want to “steer markets”, and those who want to “set them free.” Whether ideologies that were developed during the 1930s, when the world was a very different place, can ever be really relevant to the 2010s is not discussed.
In ‘Fear the Boom and Bust’, Keynes and Hayek come back to life to attend an economics conference on the economic crisis. Before the conference begins, and at the insistence of Keynes, they go out for a night on the town and sing about why there’s a “boom and bust” cycle in modern economies and good reason to fear it.
This blog was published on 29 June 2010