Understanding Keynes General Theory

This book is a comprehensive guide for those seeking to fully understand Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money , and especially those approaching the work for the first time. It also highlights Keynes' important policy insights. This book is an essential introduction to Keynes' most influential text.

This book was originally published by Macmillan in 1936. It was voted the top Academic Book that Shaped Modern Britain by Academic Book Week (UK) in 2017, and in 2011 was placed on Time Magazine's top 100 non-fiction books written in English since 1923. Reissued with a fresh Introduction by the Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman and a new Afterword by Keynes’ biographer Robert Skidelsky, this important work is made available to a new generation. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money transformed economics and changed the face of modern macroeconomics. Keynes’ argument is based on the idea that the level of employment is not determined by the price of labour, but by the spending of money. It gave way to an entirely new approach where employment, inflation and the market economy are concerned. Highly provocative at its time of publication, this book and Keynes’ theories continue to remain the subject of much support and praise, criticism and debate. Economists at any stage in their career will enjoy revisiting this treatise and observing the relevance of Keynes’ work in today’s contemporary climate.

This book is devoted to the lasting impact of The General Theory (and Keynes’s thought) on macroeconomic theory, methodology and its relevance for understanding the post-crisis challenges of the 21st Century. A number of contributions take their departure from Keynes's presentation during the 1930's of his new macroeconomic understanding and its policy implications. Other chapters take a more pluralistic view of Keynes's ideas and their importance for contemporary debates. Further, it is demonstrated that many textbooks often misrepresent The General Theory and therefore cannot be a reliable guide to 21st Century economic policy.

In this guide to general theory, Mark Hayes presents Keynes's illustrious work as a sophisticated Marshallian theory fo the competitive equillibrium of the economy as a whole.

Back to the future: a heterodox economist rewrites Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money to serve as the basis for a macroeconomics for the twenty-first century. John Maynard Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money was the most influential economic idea of the twentieth century. But, argues Stephen Marglin, its radical implications were obscured by Keynes's lack of the mathematical tools necessary to argue convincingly that the problem was the market itself, as distinct from myriad sources of friction around its margins. Marglin fills in the theoretical gaps, revealing the deeper meaning of the General Theory. Drawing on eight decades of discussion and debate since the General Theory was published, as well as on his own research, Marglin substantiates Keynes's intuition that there is no mechanism within a capitalist economy that ensures full employment. Even if deregulating the economy could make it more like the textbook ideal of perfect competition, this would not address the problem that Keynes identified: the potential inadequacy of aggregate demand. Ordinary citizens have paid a steep price for the distortion of Keynes's message. Fiscal policy has been relegated to emergencies like the Great Recession. Monetary policy has focused unduly on inflation. In both cases the underlying rationale is the false premise that in the long run at least the economy is self-regulating so that fiscal policy is unnecessary and inflation beyond a modest 2 percent serves no useful purpose. Fleshing out Keynes's intuition that the problem is not the warts on the body of capitalism but capitalism itself, Raising Keynes provides the foundation for a twenty-first-century macroeconomics that can both respond to crises and guide long-run policy.

This book makes Keynes's writing on his General Theory accessible to students by presenting this theory in a careful, consistent manner that is faithful to the original. Keynes's theory continues to be important, because the issues it raised, such as the problems of involuntary unemployment, the volatility of investment, and the complexity of monetary arrangements in modern capitalist economies, are still with us. Keynes's method of analysis, which tries to allow for the complications of dealing with historical time, deserves the careful attention given in this book. Keynes's formal analysis dealt only with a short period of time during which changes in productive capacity as a result of net investment were small relative to initial productive capacity. Roy Harrod and Joan Robinson were the two most prominent followers of Keynes who attempted to extend his analysis to the long period by allowing for the effects of investment on productive capacity as well as on effective demand. The careful examination of their writings on this topic is a natural complement to the presentation of Keynes's General Theory and makes clear the severe limitations on any use of equilibrium concepts in dealing with accumulation in models that try to observe Keynes's warnings about an unknowable future in the type of world we inhabit.