While my overall understanding of economics remains very basic, I think that I have picked up enough to be at least a little uncomfortable with all the different mainstream schools. Not surprisingly, then, I have come to appreciate those voices that reject the traditional and offer up ideas and stories that run counter to the way things were perceived pre-2008.
Surprisingly, though, one such voice is a guy named Steve Keen, who endorses the ideas of Keynes, but not in the way that they have been distorted by guys like Hicks and Krugman. What I like about his writing (and others like him) is that he convincingly demonstrates how all the competing schools still operate from the same faulty framing issues, and are unable to appreciate how their models of a complex economy become useless any time after T-zero. Even the Austrians fall into the same dichotomy problem, specifically government versus markets, as if it was really that simple.
Now, I am not yet convinced that stimulus will provide the answer, but I am at least receptive to the logic of this camp, since they fall under the heading of folks who saw what was coming. And part of my reluctance to embrace them is perhaps because of my own priors -- namely, I remain skeptical of how effective the government can be given it's lack of a profit/loss gauge to guide it to efficient decisions.
