Keynes was very capable of rapidly changing his opinion…. He has been so much an intuitive genius, but not much a strict logical reasoner…. I regard him as a real genius, but not as a great economist, you know. He was not a very consistent or logical thinker.
UPDATE: Tom Hazlett e-mailed me to say that the date of his interview with Hayek likely wasn’t 1977; it more likely was conducted in 1978 or 1979.
And I should have added earlier that in August 1983 Sandy Ikeda, George Selgin, and I interviewed Henry Hazlitt at Mr. Hazlitt’s home in Wilton, CT. (I recall that he had a vanity license tag on his car that read “HAZ.”) At one point during the interview, Hazlitt went on a little riff praising Keynes’s genius and intellect and sharpness of wit; Hazlitt paused in the middle of his praise for Keynes to say something like (I forget his exact words) “Of course, Keynes was a poor economist.”
