The Politics of Planning

The concept of `economic planning' was a central theme of the popular economic policy debate in the 1930s. Dr Ritschel traces the many interpretations of planning, and examines the process of idealogical construction and dissemination of the new economic ideas. He finishes with an explanation of the planners' retreat, later in the decade, from the economics of planning towards the far less ambitious (but also less contentious) alternative - the `middle way' of Keynesian economics.