ABSTRACT
When an author presents an analysis of which he thinks that it can ‘offer some foundation for a permanent solution to the problem of stagflation’ (Weitzman 1985: 952) and when a book in which he expands his ideas (Weitzman 1984) is praised-on the dust cover-as ‘marvellous’ by Robert Solow, as ‘important, stimulating, readable and persuasive’ by James Meade, one tends to be torn between hope and scepticism. While I can easily agree with Meade that Weitzman’s ideas are important, stimulating, readable and persuasive, I find it more difficult to accept Weitzman’s high hopes that he has found a comparatively simple method to escape from a world of Keynesian unemployment into a non-inflationary full employment world. While this problem is not the only subject of his book, it is the predominant and most important theme which occupies the centre of his book and of the two articles in which he has given the gist of his ideas (Weitzman 1983; 1985).
