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MichaelVassar comments on For progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, read great books - Less Wrong
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I think this post overstates the case a bit. My general impression is that the scientific method "wins" even in economics and that later works are better than earlier works.
Now it might be true that the average macro-economist of today understands less than Keynes did but I'd be hard pressed to say that the best don't understand more. Moreover, there are really great distillers. In macro for example, Hicks distilled Keynes into something that I would consider more useful that the original.
Nonetheless, I think it is correct that someone should be reading the originals. If not there is the propensity for a particular distiller to miss an important insight and then for everyone else to go one missing it.
What this says to me is that there should be rewards to re-discovery. Suppose that I read Adam Smith and rediscover something great. I should be rewarded for that just as much as if I had come up with the idea myself. Afterall, it has the same effect on the current state of knowledge. However, that will not happen.
Rediscovering is not as prestigious as discovering, because it is not as difficult and does not signal intellectual greatness.
I'm sure some people understand more than Keynes, both today and in his time, but can you name them? The understanding of the best unrecognized synthesizing geniuses of both today and Keynes' day aren't available. If you think that the most famous contemporary macro people know more than Keynes I won't laugh, just observe that they are probably using that knowledge to make hedge fund managers rich, not sharing it with you.
Macro-economists are rightly subject to the criticism "if your so smart, why aren't you rich".
So the easy answers might be:
Ben Bernanke
Mark Gertler
Micheal Wooford
Greg Mankiw
Its not clear to me why macro-economists are rightly subject to such criticism. To me its like asking a mathematician, "If you're so good at logical reasoning why didn't you create the next killer app"
Understanding how the economy works and applying that knowledge to a particular task are completely different.
'Designing the next killer app' seems to rely heavily on predicting what people will want, which is many steps and a lot of knowledge away from logical reasoning.