The Schools at War: Keynesians, Monetarists, and the Economists Who Broke With Them

The postwar mainstream: government demand management smooths the business cycle.

Friedman's first challenge: the money supply, not fiscal policy, drives the cycle.

The Austrian counter: central planning of any kind, monetary or fiscal, cannot know what only markets can discover.

Robert Lucas Jr., whose 1976 critique argued Keynesian econometric models could not survive rational, forward-looking agents.

New Classical Economics, the school Lucas built on rational expectations.

James M. Buchanan, who turned the same self-interest lens on politicians and bureaucrats rather than markets.

Public Choice Theory: government failure gets the same scrutiny economics gives market failure.

Arthur Laffer, Reagan's tax-cut argument sketched, as the story goes, on a napkin.

The Laffer Curve itself, and the dispute over whether real tax rates actually sit on its revenue-losing side.

Supply-Side Economics, the school these tax-cut arguments built.

Black Monday, 1987: a crash that tested every school's account of what markets actually do under stress.

Alan Greenspan, the Fed chair who answered Black Monday with liquidity and, a decade later, warned of the dot-com bubble in the same breath his own policy is accused of having fed.