During the 1950s and 1960s, Keynesian policy came to mean fine-tuning through
monetary and fiscal policy. Abba Lerner (1903-1982) was an influential force in directing
Keynesian analysis toward such fine-tuning. In his Economics of Control (1944), Lerner
advocated that government not follow a policy of sound, finance (always balance the budget);
it should instead follow a policy of functional finance, which considered only the results of
policies, not the policies themselves.