ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, only about 5 percent of Americans have any direct memory – and then mostly from their childhood – of the Great Depression. The proportion is similar in the countries of Western Europe and in other parts of the economically developed world. To the remaining 95 percent of the population of these countries, the 1930s are history. The decade is as remote for them as the American Revolutionary War or the battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo. The more distant we are from the Great Depression, the less relevant seems the contribution made by Maynard Keynes. His legacy is still with us today, but the vast majority of us are unconscious of it because we have forgotten the disease from which the world economy had suffered during the 1930s.
