During the 1940s and 1950s, the debate over the government's role in economic management centred on the issue of whether or not a mixed economy and a welfare state are desirable. The experience of the Great Depression during the 1930s began to cast doubt on the automatic coordination, and especially the macroeconomic
Coordination function of the capitalistic free market economic. As a result, the Keynesian counter-cyclical macroeconomic policy function of the government became a new sub-topic within the bebate, overriding the mostly microeconomic issue of resource allocation in the socialist economic calculation debate. The Keynesian economists advocated government intervention to temedy the market failures in the
Macroeconomic level, particularly the unemployment phenomenon. This increased the popularity for a mixed ecinomy and welfare state, and, as a result, the government's role continued to grow. Interestingly, the new argument for government in tervention in the macroeconomic level was also strengthened by the development of macroeconomic modeling, which was partly spurred by the socialist planning theory that
Developed in response to the earller debate on the possibility of socialist economic calculation.