Letters to the editor: Keynes’s advocacy directly challenged the economic belief that free markets are self-correcting

Love for the game

Sir — Britain’s Prince William recently transformed one of London’s most iconic thoroughfares, The Mall, which leads up to the Buckingham Palace, into a temporary cricket pitch for a casual game with past and present legends of the sport. The sight brought back fond memories of Calcutta during bandh days. With the usually bustling streets falling completely silent, locals had the rare opportunity to turn empty roads into lively neighbourhood cricket grounds. From London’s royal avenues to Calcutta’s deserted streets, the love of the game knows no boundaries.

Sourish Misra,
Calcutta

Policy shift

Sir — The 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded jointly to the American economists, Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford, for their groundbreaking work on the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation (“Keynes returns”, Oct 14). Traditional models approached the economy from the top down. But Hall and Woodford helped shift the paradigm by building macroeconomic models from the ground up, focusing on individual choices, forward-looking expectations, and real-world frictions. Their work has helped central bankers and policymakers navigate major economic disruptions and smooth out the peaks and the troughs of the business cycle.

Jayanta Datta,
Hooghly

Sir — The 2026 Nobel laureates in economics have contributed to the development of models that strengthen fiscal and monetary strategies for managing economic fluctuations. In economics, stabilisation policies are measures adopted by governments or central banks to smooth out fluctuations, maintain steady growth and minimise unemployment. This framework was originated by the economist, John Maynard Keynes, during the Great Depression, a severe global downturn marked by widespread poverty, high unemployment, and banking collapses. Keynes’s advocacy for State intervention directly challenged the prevailing classical economic belief that free markets are entirely self-correcting.

S.S. Paul,
Nadia

Sir — New Keynesian models developed by Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford are widely used by central banks to assess how stabilisation policies impact business cycles. The idea of economic stabilisation, however, owes much to John Maynard Keynes whose theory challenged the dominant classical view that free markets could automatically correct their imbalances.

Khokan Das,
Calcutta

Flawed system

Sir — Arghya Sengupta’s article, “Voice of reason” (Oct 14), highlights the crisis surrounding the appointment of election commissioners. This issue transcends electoral logistics; it is a battle to prevent executive dominance from gaining possession of democratic structures. Merely including the chief justice of India in the selection panel is not a solution. If constitutional ethics are compromised from the outset, even judicial oversight cannot mask farcical appointments.

Mohammad Arif,
Dhanbad

Join the dots

Sir — The cycle of environmental vulnerability in India, driven by interconnected factors like extreme heat, severe flooding, and mismanagement of waste, is the consequence of both climate change and effective policy gaps (“Connected perils”, Oct 14). Extreme heat results from factors such as climate change and rapid urbanisation that are also major causes of urban flooding and waste management crises. The horrific memory of the 2015 Chennai floods is worth mentioning in this context.

Prasun Kumar Dutta,
Kharagpur