Keynes and Kalecki: The Forerunners

Abstract

Having completed a limited coverage of the propositions of writers on growth showing a distinct neoclassical bias, models of the Keynesian persuasion will be discussed in the next four chapters. The purer Keynesian models that will be reviewed here owe, as their nominal title suggests, substantial debt to the reorganisation of economic thinking perpetrated by the writings and actions of J. M. Keynes. Although, during the period of his work, Keynes’s influence was unique, subsequent writers have had convenience to the strikingly similar, and often more direct, work of the Polish economist, Michal Kalecki.^l Thus this chapter, showing the theoretical foundations for the work presented in subsequent chapters, will deal with the insights provided by both writers whose work appeared almost simultaneously in their respective spheres of influence. Particular writers’ utilisation of these seminal ideas will not be spelled out explicitly, for they should in most cases be obvious, with some relying merely on the work of Keynes and others on both (and with a good deal of Karl Marx included in Kalecki’s influence). Neither will an attempt be made to distinguish all the major points of difference between Keynes and Kalecki or between the two and the received body of economic theory as it existed at the time of their work.