Abstract
This chapter incorporates portions of a lecture delivered in 1974 to the British Academy with the title “Re-reading Keynes”. Kahn retraces how Keynes abandoned the Quantity Theory of Money in favour of the model set out in the General Theory, where inflation results from the interaction between nominal wages and the level of aggregate demand. The elaboration of this model paved the way to Keynes’s growing awareness that if unemployment ceased to be a serious problem, it would be replaced by the problem of pressure to raise money wages faster than productivity and by this means to create inflation.
Originally publ. in: Kahn, R. F. (1978). Some Aspects of the Development of Keynes’s Thought. Journal of Economic Literature, 16(2), 545–559. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2722880
Reprint by Springer International Publishing 2022 with kind permission
This article incorporates—either literally or by way of substance—considerable portions of a lecture delivered on 6 November 1974 to the British Academy on “Re-reading Keynes” [8, 1974]. I am indebted to the British Academy for permission to make use of this material. I owe much to Professor Donald Moggridge of the University of Toronto.
My references to Keynes’s writings are to the Royal Economic Society edition of The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, edited by Professor Sir Austin Robinson and Professor Donald Moggridge. Volumes XIII and XIV in the series, entitled The General Theory and After, comprise, with considerable editorial comment hitherto unpublished, memoranda and letters, and some of Keynes’s articles.
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Notes
- 1.
See also Vol. XIII, p. 1 [15, 1973].
- 2.
See especially Vol. XIII, pp. 337–43.
- 3.
A shorter version of Professor Myrdal’s book was originally published in Swedish [21, 1931]. Three introductory chapters were added in the German version, from the first of which the passage quoted in the text is taken. The German version was published in 1933 as part of Beiträge zur Geldtheorie, edited by Professor Hayek [22]. An English translation of the German version was published in 1939 [23].
- 4.
Joan Robinson’s article received Keynes’s approval after it had been published.
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Kahn, R.F. (2022). Some Aspects of the Development of Keynes’s Thought. In: Marcuzzo, M.C., Paesani, P. (eds) Richard F. Kahn. Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98588-2_6
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