It is important to emphasize the obvious distinction between the Stockholm economists of the 1930s and the Stockholm School of Keynesian-oriented macroeconomics. The former was a brilliant group of individuals who, except for Erik Lundberg, made their main contributions in fields outside of Keynesian-oriented macroeconomics. I refer, for instance, to Erik Lindahl's contributions to the theory of public finance, intertemporal allocation of resources, and the theory of interest rates and prices; Bertil Ohlin's achievements in the theory of international trade; Gunnar Myrdal's creative discussion of uncertainty and his reinterpretation of Wicksell's monetary theory (as well as his later monumental work on the race problem in the United States); and Ingvar Svennilson's microeconomic theory of the firm (as well as his subsequent empirical analysis of economic growth and structural change in Europe). I make this obvious point simply to emphasize that our judgment of the contributions to economics of this brilliant group of people should not be made solely on the claims, emanating mainly from Myrdal and Ohlin, that they anticipated Keynes's General Theory, but also on their achievements in other branches of economic analysis.

I basically agree with the judgment of Don Patinkin and Paul Samuelson that the contribution of the Stockholm School to “the Keynesian Revolution” was rather modest. First, the Stockholm economists of the 1930s did not really have a full-fledged theory of the determination of aggregate output and employment and of “transmission mechanisms” from product to labor markets.