This Fall (October/November 2022) marks the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Review of Keynesian Economics (ROKE). The founding co-editors were Louis-Philippe Rochon, Matias Vernengo, and I. At the beginning of 2018 Louis-Philippe Rochon stepped down to become sole editor of the Review of Political Economy and he was replaced by Esteban Pérez Caldentey.
Since then, ROKE has further enhanced its reputation, becoming a leading heterodox economics journal as measured by its Clarivate citation score. It also has premier standing for official research assessment purposes in France, Italy, and Brazil.
Active plans for the journal were set in motion in late 2011 and the first issue was published in Autumn 2012. That first issue includes a founding statement by the three co-editors which lays out the motivation for establishing the journal, its scope, and its purpose. The statement is on ROKE’s website. I think it has aged very well and there is not much in it that I would change today. I encourage people to read it.
Louis-Philippe Rochon was instrumental in the journal’s creation. In 2011 he approached Matias with the idea of creating a new journal, and he also provided the business contact to Edward Elgar which publishes the journal. Without his entrepreneurial energy, ROKE would not have come into being.
That said, the name and scope of ROKE are attributable to Matias and I, and there is a fun story behind that. In November 2011, we attended a conference organized by Jamie Galbraith at the University of Texas on the euro crisis. Matias invited me to discuss Louis-Philippe’s proposal to co-found and co-edit a new journal.
After the conference was over, we met at a café in Austin airport. Louis-Philippe’s proposal was for a new journal that was to be called The Post Keynesian Review of Money and Finance. I told Matias that I was not interested in participating in a journal on money & banking, but I was interested in participating in a journal on macroeconomics that sought to change the climate of thinking and direction of thought.
Recall that in 2011 the global economy was still feeling the aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis. My view, which I still hold, was the economics profession bears a substantial responsibility for that crisis because of the economic theory and policy advice it had peddled over the prior four decades. Given that, I thought there was need for a journal that would provide a platform for challenging and changing the economics status quo. That journal would be an enduring piece of intellectual social capital.
Matias agreed with that, and we started thinking about possible names. I proposed Journal of Keynesian Economics, but Matias pointed out the acronym for that would be JOKE (which Matias said was also the reason Paul Davidson opted for the name Journal of Post Keynesian Economics in 1979). We then both simultaneously proposed Review of Keynesian Economics (ROKE), and the rest is history.
From the beginning, a central feature of the ROKE project has been its pluralist disposition. Robert Solow wrote approvingly of that when he accepted to be a board member, describing ROKE’s task as one of effecting “cultural change” in economics. The rationale for pluralism is the net through which we filter economic ideas is not capable of winnowing ideas down to just one school of thought. Consequently, we are obliged to live with many. That does not mean anything goes, but it does mean multiple positions may pass the tests of logical and empirical consistency.
With the tenth anniversary, Matias is stepping down as a co-editor but will continue as ROKE’s book editor. Professor Julia Braga of the Federal Fluminense University in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil has agreed to be a new co-editor.