The origins and demise of disequilibrium macroeconomics: a response to Goulven Rubin

We are grateful to Goulven Rubin for taking the time to engage so carefully with our book and for the positive things he says about it. He has raised a number of points where, should we have the opportunity to produce a second edition, we should fill out our story and, no doubt, amend some of the details. However, he has not persuaded us that the main thrust of our interpretation needs to be modified. Our starting point was that we wanted to understand the explosion of interest in disequilibrium theory in the late 1960s and early 1970s—the literature associated above all with Robert Clower, Axel Leijonhufvud, Robert Barro and Herschel Grossman. We thought, initially, that this was a story we could tell in one or two journal articles but as we got into the topic we realized it needed to become a book, for it was much bigger story than we had anticipated. One direction in which we needed to extend our work was to take the story back in time, from Clower and Leijonhufvud to Don Patinkin and, before him, Oskar Lange. [...]