At a time when authoritarianism is on the rise again, the lessons offered by world-renowned economist John Maynard Keynes are more timely than ever

• Paul Constant is a writer at Civic Ventures, a cofounder of the Seattle Review of Books, and a frequent cohost of the "Pitchfork Economics" podcast with Nick Hanauer and David Goldstein.
• In the latest episode of Pitchfork Economics, Zach Carter, the author of a new bestselling book on John Maynard Keynes, says that Keynes was a social thinker — and that he probably wouldn't approve of the stimulus bill and indiscriminate spending.
• Instead, Carter believes that Keynes would see this moment as an opportunity to close the inequality gap, and heal social unrest.

We've all seen the mind-boggling charts demonstrating how income inequality has expanded to unprecedented levels in America since the late 1970s. We know that this ever-growing divide between the wealthiest one percent of all Americans and the rest of us was the result of a systemic trickle-down economic framework of tax cuts and deregulation promoted by conservative groups. (If you need a refresher, I wrote about the origins of that conspiracy earlier this summer.) So we know what happened to ruin the American economy, and we know who committed the heist, and why they did it.

But the funny thing is, not many progressives really understand much about the economic system that was in place for most of the 20th century. We know that up until the late 1970s, an ever-growing number of Americans were included in the economy — though of course racism and sexism held too many of our neighbors back from fully participating.

We know that tax rates for the wealthiest Americans were high in post-war America, and that investments in our infrastructure were at unprecedented levels for most of the last century. But the mechanics of that American prosperity — the philosophy behind why the economy worked as well as it did — have been largely forgotten.

In the latest episode of Pitchfork Economics, David Goldstein credits economist John Maynard Keynes as "without a doubt, the most influential economist of the first three quarters of the 20th century. It was his ideas that guided the policies of the New Deal and essentially defined American liberalism," Goldstein said.

In the episode, Goldstein interviews Zach Carter, the author of a new bestselling book titled "The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes." Carter wrote the book to help demystify and add nuance to Keynes's life and work.

While most Econ 101 classes simply, and truthfully, identify Keynes as "the economist who argued that governments should spend money during recessions to help pull the economy out of the doldrums and get employment moving again," Carter said, much of the nuance and understanding of Keynes's story has been forgotten as the neoliberal trickle-down crowd has taken hold.

Keynesianism, Carter argues, was "more a way of looking at the world than a specific set of policies or policy tools." Keynes "was a social thinker, a philosopher, and a statesman whose intellectual project was concerned with the great problems of his day. And those problems in particular were World War II and the rise of authoritarianism all over the world of the 1920s and 1930s."

At a time when authoritarianism and nationalism is on the rise again, Carter's framing of Keynes as someone who sought to use economics to "prevent war and heal societies that have been torn apart or put under strain" seems more timely than ever. Carter says Keynes "spent his whole life trying to prevent war, and he believed that economic policy was a very effective tool that could be deployed nonviolently to prevent war."

Keynesian economics was an attempt to bring a more human scale to industry, international relations, and everyday life. "He's concerned with all of these very big ideas about humanity and how to get along," Carter said.

Or, as Goldstein puts it, "I think Keynes would have agreed that the purpose of economics is not to keep unemployment and inflation low and balance your budgets. It's actually to live the good life."

Keynes absolutely would have been in favor of adding to the deficit to combat coronavirus with trillions of dollars in stimulus programs, but Carter doesn't think he would have been in favor of indiscriminate spending.

"He recognized that those big numbers are certainly necessary," Carter said, "but the real test of the program for him would be what's happening in the streets."

Using that metric, the most recent stimulus bill was largely a failure. The mood on the street is historically uncertain and angry. On just about every main commercial street in America, you'll find recently shuttered businesses. Depending on state policy, mass evictions are either happening or they're looming on the horizon. Keynes would not approve.

The history books show us what an appropriate Keynesian response looks like.

"In many ways, the New Deal expresses the full ambition of the Keynesian project," Carter said, because it was "a total reworking of the nation state, and what it can and not to do."

In the 19th century, the idea that governments might take a more granular role in the betterment of everyday life for citizens was almost unthinkable. But New Deal-era programs like Social Security, which provided for a good retirement for elderly Americans, to the Works Progress Administration, which put Americans to work creating great works of art and culture, were an extension of Keynes's conception of the human side of economics.

Carter argues that decades after World War II, economists eventually forgot about the peaceful, human scale that Keynes brought to economics, remembering only the importance of spending.

"There were people who called themselves Keynesian in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations saying, 'the thing we need to do is spend money, and it doesn't really matter so much what we spend it on. We could spend it on napalm and machine guns or we could spend it on welfare checks,'" Carter said.

This corruption of Keynesian economics, Carter said, "would have been horrifying to Keynes," and that economic inattention almost certainly paved the way for neoliberal economists to subvert the existing system with an agenda of trickle-down austerity.

In the end, Carter said, Keynes was an optimist who "always believed that humanity's problems were made by humanity. They weren't facts of nature that were unalterable. The world could become a better place if we just made it better tomorrow. It could always be better than today."

So is this the right time for a reclamation of Keynesian economics? Is there room for his brand of optimism again? If Keynes were alive today, Carter believes he'd see the opportunity to close our massive inequality gap and heal our social unrest as "a project of social harmony."

The first step toward building that harmony is coming to the realization that an economy "isn't just math. This is the way societies hang together. This is the way people interact with each other, the way that people who are different come together to do things that they couldn't do apart.'"

Too often, we discuss the economy as something separate from the other headlines in the newspaper — the province of logic and numbers and spreadsheets. But perhaps if we took a more holistic, Keynesian understanding of economics, we could bridge the bitter partisan divide and quell the unsettling drumbeat of nationalism by making life more worth living for everyone.