britain partly because gains -- keynes has public opinion there. the al is already beginning to split apart. so the germans despite being maybe again legitimately aghast at these terms, can begin to point to divisions amongst their allies. they sent troops directly into the area. france is not that up by britain. the alliance begin the fracture very early on. the upshot of this was in 1941 france surrendered to hitler and the british responded by sinking the french fleet off the coast of algeria. that that blood was already there in the early days after versailles. maybe that was inevitable. britain and france had been traditional enemies for centuries so maybe it made sense. this sense of missed opportunity i think is significant with the u.s. there are a lot of ways the u.s. could have stayed out of the war . they could have entered the war but more wholeheartedly say we stand with our allies and that their terms and keep that army in europe to enforce them. or the u.s. could have done something more along the lines of what keynes was suggesting

he sometimes stressed he wasn't a modern scientist and along these lines was that of john maynard keynes who had brought some of the new ten papers in 1936 auction. he said newton wasn't the first of the age of reason. he was the last of the magicians, the last of the babylonians and samaria and the last that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those that begin to build the intellectual inheritance rather than less than 10,000 years ago. i don't quite buy that. he wasn't a talented holdover from the magical past. he also wasn't a modern scientist. rather he crossed the frontier between the natural philosophy of the past and what became modern science. he provided his achievement if not his outlook for personal behavior he provided the power time -- paradigm that followed. the center of my interest is how we became anna so i force myself to consider what aspects of the past was progressive would help to develop what we now have as science and what stood in the way. this kind of judgmental is on is sometimes called the . a term of the weighted interpretat

. >> this is a great question and for those who haven't already read keynes's great article "economic possibilities for our grandchildren," he talked-b made predictions about what would happen to our generation. he was more or less spot on in terms of gdp per capita. he extrapolated those functions exactly right and got that right. and he inferred that he looked around people who were that wealthy and inferred people wouldn't want to work a lot. they would go fox hunting occasionally or whatever, but there wasn't much else to do without wealth. of course that part he got wrong. people are not working 10 to 15 hours a week. mostly those who are working are working a lot more than that. there are a number of reasons for that. i mean part of it is we have a lot more we can spend our money on now than we did back then. there's lots of new goods that i think people enjoy. part of it also, and this gets into sociology. i think a lot of people, they enjoy working. there's a meaning that it gives to life for a lot of people. bob putnam described what happened when work leaves a community and

erik: the historian in an blames john maynard keynes. the performance artist blames paul krugman. some excerpts of his piece in the huffington. "by his own standards, krugman's argument was lame. like his journalism on the united states, is writings on britain are characterized by extreme partisanship with a touristic level of knowledge." let's forget about touristic knowledge. extreme partisanship -- pot calling the kettle black? brendan: is pro or anti-austerity the right way to look at the u.k. election? james: i don't think it is. the question is growth. one of the puzzling questions about the u.k. in particular is what is happening in productivity. how does it connect to the eu -- connect the rest of the world to the eu? that is something i hope cameron gets back to. brendan: i would argue niall ferguson has done a better job of selling union then david cameron was ever able to do. he wrote a book about the british empire. i saw hints of that, that this is the thing we built together but that is not heard in this debate over union. erik: niall is a scotsman and i will be fasc

the uk labour party should blame keynes for their election defeat. anyone to take krugman to task.wed him. let's speak with neal ferguson, senior fellow at the hoover institute. he came in and i wanted to hear this three four, five years ago, i think. i said i kind of look at you as a unicorn. i said to him. i wasn't being, it was a pejorative but just so many of his, his ideas seemed like they have been tested and haven't worked in so many places around the world, historically. i thought we learned our lesson about a lot of these things and he called our ideas growth ideas. you know -- >> antiquated. >> ideas that are dead, but keep coming back to life. so seeing what happened and reading your piece in the uk was just pretty satisfying. he said this would never work. >> i'm not going to be at -- >> a unicorn is just very rare. >> let's just think about the issue. >> it's his stock. >> this is a major theoretical debate. the uk was going to self-destruct which means david cameron, prime minister, we're going to destroy the british economy by trying to bring the deficit under contro

showed at the time -- this is 2002 -- the gel gallup said at that time, of all the environmental keynes, the number one was global. last march there was a poll that came out from gallup and it was next to the last. it was down out of some 20 different environmental concerns. so the people have realized that this largest tax increase in the history of america if it were to take place it's not going to solve a problem and a problem really that doesn't exist to the extent that it's been represented. now today i want to -- there is they're still debating this. i want to bring people up to date on where we are now on the whole -- the fact that climate change is not based on hard evidence and observations but rather a set of wishful beliefs, well-scripted dialogue of president obama and the environmental alarmists intended to scare the american people into accepting this thing that would be so devastating economically to america. the other day a good friend of mine lamar smith from the house -- i like lamar. he and i were elected actually the same day many years ago. lamar is the chairman of