Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T10:14:32.944Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - Conclusion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2009

Get access

Summary

A main theme of this book is that the General Theory put into the language of economics beliefs that Keynes held in the 1920s. The beliefs concerned progress, the role of the state in achieving progress, the importance of investment for progress, and the harmful effect of uncertainty on investment and progress.

As early as 1924, Keynes gave a lecture at Oxford “The End of Laissez-Faire.” What I have called the main themes are there, not hidden as afterthoughts in a wide-ranging essay but as main ideas:

Many of the greatest economic evils of our time are the fruits of risk, uncertainty, and ignorance. It is because particular individuals … are able to take advantage of uncertainty and ignorance, and also because for the same reason big business is often a lottery, that great inequalities of wealth come about; and these same factors are also the cause of the unemployment of labour, or the disappointment of reasonable business expectations, and of the impairment of efficiency and production …

I believe that some coordinated act of intelligent judgment is required as to the scale on which it is desirable that the community as a whole should save, the scale on which these savings should go abroad in the form of foreign investments, and whether the present organization of the investment market distributes savings along the most rationally productive channels.

Type
Chapter
Information
Keynes's Monetary Theory
A Different Interpretation
, pp. 303 - 321
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Conclusion
  • Allan H. Meltzer
  • Book: Keynes's Monetary Theory
  • Online publication: 05 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511528415.008
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Conclusion
  • Allan H. Meltzer
  • Book: Keynes's Monetary Theory
  • Online publication: 05 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511528415.008
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Conclusion
  • Allan H. Meltzer
  • Book: Keynes's Monetary Theory
  • Online publication: 05 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511528415.008
Available formats
×