Dueling Economists: A century of back-and-forth between Hayek and Keynes.

The Weekly Standard reports:

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), godfather of the “stimulus” and the “multiplier,” and Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), who argued that government intervention in the economy breeds prosperity-killing economic distortions, weren’t just polar opposites in economic theory. They were real-life sparring partners. And as Nicholas Wapshott points out in his double biography, their ideas played themselves out in Great Britain, where both Keynes and Hayek lived and taught, and in the United States, where the economic philosophies of both informed the highest levels of policy-making—at different times, of course. During the 1930s, Keynes, at Cambridge, and Hayek, at the London School of Economics, debated each other in person, by proxy (both had coteries of disciples), and in newspaper columns, and exchanged febrile levels of correspondence over a harsh review that Hayek had given Keynes’s A Treatise on Money (1930). They also spent a night together as unlikely comrades in 1942—on the roof of the King’s College Chapel at Cambridge, where they stood, shovels in hand, as part of a volunteer brigade set up to deflect whatever incendiary bombs the Luftwaffe might pour (but fortunately never did) upon that great medieval edifice.