Abstract
The elemental core of Keynes’s theory of money and employment can be stated in two sentences. To buy the means (natural resources, produced facilities and human work) of producing goods is to gamble on the eventual sale value of those goods. From time to time businessmen can lose their nerve and refuse this gamble, preferring to keep their wealth in money rather than embark it in the products of employment. To carry conviction and full understanding this statement needs to be elaborated with the answers to many questions. We may say that in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money Keynes answered many of the questions without, at any point, incisively presenting the statement itself. The level of simplicity that the statement attains had to wait for the article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics of 1937.
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Notes
G. L. S. Shackle, ‘Interest Rates and the Pace of Investment’ Economic Journal, vol 56, no. 221, March 1946, pp. 1–17, reprinted in G. L. S. Shackle, Uncertainty in Economics and other Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), pp. 128–44.
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© 1988 G. L. S. Shackle
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Frowen, S.F. (1988). Levels of Simplicity in Keynes’s Theory of Money and Employment. In: Frowen, S.F. (eds) Business, Time and Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08100-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08100-4_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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