ABSTRACT
It is a testimony to the influence of Alfred Eichner's approach to economic phenomena that although he spent most of his life developing and propagating what has come to be known as "post Keynesian economics," most economists who worked with him or who have been influenced by his work now give as much importance to the Evolutionary or Institutional aspects of economics as they do to the narrow version of "post-Keynesian" economics (with the hyphen included) that grew out of the extensions of the work of J.M. Keynes, Michal Kalecki, Roy Harrod, and Piero Sraffa to the problems of the long-period theory of growth and distribution worked out by a small group of economists in Cambridge, England, in the 1960s. Indeed, it would not be too far from the truth to say that Eichner was never a "post-Keynesian" in this narrow sense, although he worked to integrate and synthesize the Cambridge theories within his own approach. This activity produced a highly productive interaction that eventually brought about what might better be called a neo-institutional or neo-evolutionary synthesis with Keynes's economics, but that is now best known as post Keynesian economics (without the hyphen!).
