Ferguson of Harvard Apologizes for Remarks on Keynes

Mr. Ferguson, who is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard, has been an outspoken critic of Keynesian economics, warning that high government deficits would hurt economic growth, rather than help it, as Keynesians argue.

The comments Mr. Ferguson apologized for came in response to an audience question on Thursday at the Strategic Investment Conference in Carlsbad, Calif., where he was a featured speaker. The questioner mentioned the familiar Keynes adage favoring immediate government intervention in the economy: “in the long run we are all dead.”

According to a reporter for Financial Advisor, Mr. Ferguson’s language described Keynes as “effete,” and said about his marriage to a Russian ballerina that he was more likely to be speaking with her of “poetry” rather than procreation.

In his apology, Mr. Ferguson stood by his criticisms of Keynesianism, but completely repudiated his reasoning last week: “My disagreements with Keynes’s economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation. It is simply false to suggest, as I did, that his approach to economic policy was inspired by any aspect of his personal life.”

That a prominent professor is apologizing for comments about Keynes more than 60 years after his death speaks to his still central role in the debate over the role of government in the economy.

Online, Mr. Ferguson’s comments became a proxy for that debate.

At National Review, the opinion ranged from those who worried that his comments gave the other side an easy argument against austerity, to those like Jonah Goldberg, who wrote that Mr. Ferguson’s argument was a common one. Mr. Goldberg listed the many conservative writers who had tied Keynes’s views to his childlessness and gay relationships.

George Chauncey, a Yale scholar of gays in American history, in an interview emphasized that he was not weighing in on the economic arguments involved, but noted that Mr. Ferguson’s comments resembled past attempts to undercut gays in public life. “The idea that homosexuals are so self-centered that they pose a threat to the family, to the social order has become a habit of thought” in America, he noted, reaching its peak in the 1950s.

Rather than in the world of ideas, “the most excruciating pressure was put on gay people who were rising into senior ranks of management,” he said, adding “the fact that a man wasn’t married was a bar to reaching the highest levels of authority of corporation.”

In his blog post, Mr. Ferguson described his comments as “doubly stupid.”

“First, it is obvious that people who do not have children also care about future generations,” he wrote. And he apologized for a factual error. Referring to Keynes’s marriage to Lydia Lopokova, he wrote: “I had forgotten that Keynes’s wife Lydia miscarried.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/business/economy/ferguson-of-harvard-apologizes-for-remarks-on-keynes.html?partner=rss&emc=rss