Are There Important Differences between Classical and Twenty-First-Century Monetary Theories? Did the Keynesian and Monetarist Revolutions Matter?

It is not generally realized how little changed monetary theory and the theory and practice of monetary policy are from the time before Keynes’s General Theory. Explanations of business fluctuations by Keynes’s predecessors closely resemble the current literature, notwithstanding significant changes in the economic structure and several vaunted revolutions in theory in the meantime. Monetary policy is similarly unchanged from its dominant focus on financial stability and its atheoretic responses to shocks. The ambitious attempts of Keynes and the monetarists to account for money and uncertainty have been rejected by the mainstream of their fellow economists.