Should Great Britain have declaredwar on the Central Powers in August of 1914? This is the highly controversial question which Niall Ferguson, fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, brought across the Atlantic to the Coop on April 21. His book, The Pity of War, confronts the conventional wisdom on British involvement in the Great War. Laying out his case before a mostly adult crowd in the Coop, Ferguson was flanked by Charles S. Maier, Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies, and Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners. Martin Peretz, editor of The New Republic and lecturer in the Social Studies department, moderated. Maier and Goldhagen each presented counter-arguments, which were unfortunately characterized by an over-focus on historiography and by their general confusion.
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A Walk on the Supply Side
How Ec 10 clings to an outdated theory

"Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences,"  John Maynard Keynes once said, "are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."

Although Keynes shook up the economics profession sixty-five years ago, it is his arguments which are now the backbone of modern macroeconomics; and it is his theories which, "defunct" or not, provide the unacknowledged framework for "practical men" and economics students the world over. We in Social Analysis 10 - "Ec 10," in the Harvard vernacular - are no exception. In fact, the very bread and butter of the Gregory Mankiw/Martin Feldstein curriculum, the aggregate-supply/aggregate-demand model, is both highly controversial and as Keynesian as it was in 1936.
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