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In the late 1960s, the New Classical economists saw the same weaknesses in the microfoundations of macroeconomics that have motivated me. They hated its lack of rigor. And they sacked it.

Over the last decade, economists seemed to share a broad consensus about economic policy, with the old splits between monetarists and Keynesians apparently being settled by events. But the Great Recession of the last two years has changed everything.

In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today.

There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian.

Previous governments, particularly the one before I took over, mismanaged the economy quite badly.

Since 1948 I have spent every single day thinking how the economic and political worlds have changed.

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.

There used to be this feeling under Eisenhower and Kennedy and Roosevelt and Truman that government was a solution. Trust in the presidency fell precipitously under Johnson - real lows. And it's never come back. It's a trend that, if you're liberal, is really discouraging.

People blame the 1960s for just about everything these days, but it was the decade when all that post-war furtiveness and small-mindedness was finally blown open, and opportunity really came knocking.

Keynes eliminated economic theory's ancient role as spoilsport for inflationist and statist schemes, leading a new generation of economists on to academic power and to political pelf and privilege.