>Isn't that kind of a subjective opinion?

I wasn't using it as such. If an economist gets the ear of a president, is employed by the ECB (as the above economists were) or a column in the New York Times they're 'respectable'.

>Liberals love to push Keynes economic theories and hold him up as some kind of expert.

Conservatives use his theories too. Republican politicians who fight tooth and nail for military spending in their districts know exactly what they're doing and why.

>Even in these circles it would be hard to find someone who's actually objective about what they're seeing.

A good litmus test of this is to look at their predictions and see how they stack up to reality.

Some predictions are just bad, some are so persistently awful that they indicate that the economist has incentives that lead them to tell flat out lies.

The above graph is a good example of that.

Another, even better, litmus test is whether they ever change their mind when they've been wrong.

Liberals don't push 'Keynes' - they push 'big spending all the time as a means to redistribute wealth' - and use the cover of 'Keynes' as credibility.

'Keynes' advocated for gov. spending in downturns and saving in upturns.

The problem is:

A) Progressives want to spend, infinitely. There is no 'saving period'. Ergo - it's nothing to do with Keynes really.

B) It's really hard to tell what a 'downturn' is. 'Restoring confidence in markets' and picking up some infrastructure spending when industry is in a lull - this is on paper - a great idea. BUT - when a market has undergone a 'secular shift' - meaning that the lost jobs are not due to cyclical issues, but are permanent ... then the government ends up throwing good money after bad.

Put another way: Keynes urged spending in down cycles to level out volatility and stabilize employment. But any given downturn may not be a 'cycle' - with an impending uptick. A 'downturn' may be permanent - like 'lost jobs to China' etc..

The 'solution' to a downturn has to be commensurate with the causes: cyclical shift? Ok, some infrastructure / gov investment might help. Millions of jobs lost to China? Gov. spending will only delay the inevitable. Better to invest in 'retooling' the workforce etc.. But this is not an 'economic' solution - it's a business/strategy solution and it takes intelligence.

It is completely subjective, but it's also obvious that the Keynesians won that battle a long time ago. Go into any classroom, economics conference, FOMC meeting, etc. Keynesian theories enjoy the status of being unassailable, objective facts. Austrian and other schools of thought are mocked, derided and dismissed wholesale.

If you have actually checked out Steve Keen's presentations and/or writing you would have learned that what is being presented as "Keynesian economics" is more correctly "Samuelsonian economics". This after Paul Samuelson that sat down and basically rewrote everything Keynes to fit it into the very economic models that Keynes was attacking.

I don't much follow salt-water economics, but is that true? That Keynesians think they are actually right?

Yes. - Keynesian economics major