Axel Leijonhufvud, RIP

Was Leijonhufvud being unfair? After all, economists have reinvented economics many times in the last 200 years

There’s no discipline that discards its heroes as quickly and as comprehensively as economics. Axel Leijonhufvud is an outstanding example of this “roll-over-Beethoven” tendency. Leijonhufvud means lion’s head in Swedish.

He died on May 5 at the age of 89. He produced his seminal work at the age of 25. The book was called On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes. In it he argued, totally convincingly, that Keynesian economics had to be re-examined. There was no algebra or geometry in the book. No model, either.

The reason I am talking about him in this space, which is meant