Abstract
The purpose of this introduction is twofold: first to rehearse the intentions and leading arguments of the chapters which follow, and secondly to review their conclusions in the light of the development of thought and events since the times at which they were first published. I will deal with them under the headings of Employment Policy, Money and Inflation, International Finance, Commercial Policy and International Relations in general — the sections in which the papers in this collection are classified.
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Notes
There have been some, however. Recently Mr. O’Brien has called attention to remarks made by McCulloch at a meeting of the Political Economy Club on 3 December 1830. According to J. L. Mallet’s Diaries, ‘McCulloch in his sarcastic and cynical manner derided Mr. Tooke’s concern for old gentlemen and ladies, dowagers, spinsters and land holders. He cared not what became of them, and whether they were driven from the parlour to the garret, provided the producers — the productive and industrious classes — were benefited, which he had no doubt they were by a gradual depreciation in the value of money.’ Cited in D. P. O’Brien, J. R. McCulloch: A Study in Classic Economics (1970) p. 166. Contemporary writers who urge governments to recognize the fact of inflation as the only escape from stagnation may care to adopt McCulloch’s splendidly candid phraseology. As I have explained below (p. 12), if the old gentlemen and ladies, etc. — the-recipients of fixed incomes — don’t suffer, this recipe for growth loses its efficacy.
I have argued elsewhere that it is an essential characteristic of the so-called Theory of International Trade, not only, as the practice of the Classical economists suggested, that it assumes immobility of factor services between‘national areas’, but also that it assumes independent centres of money supply. See my ‘Note on the Formal Content of the Traditional Theory of International Trade’, in the Festschrift for Eugenio Gudin, Contribuiçoesà Anālise do Desenaoloimento Econômico (Rio de Janeiro, 1957).
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© 1971 Lord Robbins
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Robbins, L. (1971). A General View. In: Money, Trade and International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-01167-4_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-01167-4_1
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