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Keynes was a very good economist. He was brilliant. He had wonderful insights. His work has inspired me many times.

Well, Marx is having a comeback. I hear him mentioned a lot in terms of the global financial situation and the general sense of injustice out there. A lot of economic experts in America refer to him without actually using the M word, but he's around.

Keynes's contribution was not just to advocate spending government money in the middle of a recession. Every government had done that going back to the days of the Irish potato famine. What he gave to us was a way of thinking about the magnitude and the dimensions and so forth.

And Marx spoke of the fact that socialism will be the kingdom of freedom, where man realizes himself in a way that humankind has never seen before. This was an inspiring body of literature to read.

Karl Marx was in favor of socialist and communist-socialist revolutions, but he had a pretty nuanced view about it.

I am not a monetarist, and I am not a Keynesian. On certain points I agree with each.

The major reason for Keynes's rejection of communism was simply that he could scarcely identify with the grubby proletariat.

Keynesian modelling relies on marginal propensity to consume and marginal propensity to invest. The idea that if we give more money to the poor, they have a propensity to consume that's much higher than the wealthy, though I wish they would talk to my wife about that; she seems to have a propensity to consume.

Keynesian economics has always been needed.