Godley and Cripps devote their first seven seven pages to acknowledging the storms that are raging around the subject of macroeconomics. Deteriorating economic performances, and monetarists, 'converted' governments 'to the idea that it was impossible for them to control output and unemployment. All they could do, the new story went, was create conditions (including the elimination of inflation) in which enterprise could flourish.' They then spend the next 284 pages building a formal algebraic macro-economic model that will sail out of the storms of intellectual confusion. Finally they reach the safety of a two-page epilogue: 'Our claim,' they say there, 'is to have provided a framework for an orderly analysis of whole economic systems evolving through time.' They continue:

LRB 1 September 1983 | PDF Download