To many market watchers, the fight of the century wasn't the "Thrilla in Manila" that pitted heavyweight champs Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier against each other in 1975.
No, it was the battle royale that had Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes opposing Austrian economics professor Friedrich August von Hayek over the course of the Great Depression in the 1930s and on into World War II.
Though both men have been gone for years, their ideas have taken on a life of their own and currently create animated debate between who got it right, the interventionist Keynes (left) or the laissez-faire Hayek.
"Keynes was right about market failures, incomplete information and times when we get prices wrong. To forget this is to consign millions to unnecessary harm," argued Jared Bernstein, executive director of the White House Task Force on the Middle Class and a member of President Obama's economic team from 2009 to 2011. Obama's policies put him squarely in the camp of the Keynesians.
Bernstein made his argument earlier this week at the annual New York conference of the Investment Management Consultants Association (IMCA), which drew 850 attendees at the Marriott Marquis on Times Square.
His worthy opponent, Russell Roberts, a professor of economics at George Mason University and a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, countered that Obama's interventionist stimulus planners have judged their success over the last few years using the false data of predictive models rather than actual facts.
"Macroeconomics isn't a true science, like biology," said Roberts, echoing Hayek's own sentiments. "It's fake science."
To underscore the speakers' points, IMCA screened "Fight of the Century," a new economics hip-hop music video by John Papola and Russ Roberts of http://EconStories.tv, on the Marriott Marquis' mainstage. According to the video makers, "Keynes and Hayek never agreed on the answers to these questions and they still don't."
So who really won, Keynes or Hayek (left)?
