Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T07:12:32.912Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Macroeconomic Adjustment and Keynes’s Instability Argument

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2023

Peter Skott
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Get access

Summary

Keynesian involuntary unemployment describes a market failure: market forces may be incapable of bringing the economy to full employment. Wage and price stickiness are not the problem. Keynes took prices to be flexible and viewed sticky nominal wages as desirable: flexibility would tend to make the economy violently unstable. The IS-LM model provides a decent representation of the analytical skeleton behind Keynes’s fix-wage equilibrium but leaves out dynamic forces that are central to Keynes’s instability argument. By including one of these forces – the effects of expected inflation on real interest rates – in a formal model, Tobin showed that wage flexibility does not ensure the stability of full employment. The model’s assumption of an exogenous money supply misrepresents the real-world behavior of central banks as well as contemporary theory. Introducing a Taylor rule, stability can be obtained if the zero lower bound does not constrain interest rates – a result anticipated by Keynes: “only a foolish person would prefer a flexible wage policy to a flexible monetary policy”, he argued, while warning about the ineffectiveness of the policy in a liquidity trap.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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.

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.

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.

Available formats
×