John Maynard Keynes Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Richard Kahn

Critical Essay by Richard Kahn

SOURCE: "Some Aspects of the Development Keynes's Thought," in The Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. XVI, No. 2, June, 1978, pp. 545-59.

In the following excerpt, Kahn examines Keynes's changing attitudes towards the quantity theory of money, as revealed in A Tract on Monetary Reform, A Treatise on Money, and the General Theory. The critic also discusses Keynes's views on the behavior of money wages and the causes of inflation.

In this brief essay I have picked out certain particular strands of thought, on the basis partly of theoretical significance and partly of relationship to economic policy.

Monetary economics is in a state of shameful confusion. One example is the common failure to distinguish between "crowding out' in a physical sense and in a financial sense. At a time when labor bottlenecks and scarcity of productive equipment are wide-spread, the doctrine is a matter of common sense. In the financial...
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