scholarly journals Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Keynes, Public Debt and the Complex of Interest Rates

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Aspromourgos
Keyword(s):  
Interest Rates ◽  
Term Structure ◽  
Public Debt ◽  
Public Investment ◽  
Private Investment ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Debt Market

John Maynard Keynes consistently offered qualified endorsement of Abba Lerner’s “functional finance” doctrine – the qualifications particularly turning on Keynes’s attentiveness to policy management of the psychology of the debt market. This article examines Keynes’s understanding of the possible influence of public debt on interest rates, from 1930 forward. With the multiplier a mechanism whereby debt-financed public investment generates matching private saving (net of private investment) plus public saving, it becomes possible for Keynes to conclude that increasing public debt need not place upward pressure on the level of interest rates, so long as policy can successfully manage the psychology of the debt market. This particularly concerns long interest rates and hence, the term structure of rates. His theory of the term structure enables Keynes’s conviction that policy can manage and shape long rates. The conclusion considers also whether Keynes’s caution concerning public debt and interest rates retains relevance today.

KEYNES, PUBLIC DEBT, AND THE COMPLEX OF INTEREST RATES

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 493-512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Aspromourgos
Keyword(s):  
Interest Rates ◽  
Term Structure ◽  
Public Debt ◽  
Public Investment ◽  
Private Investment ◽  
Policy Management ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
Private Saving ◽  
Debt Market

John Maynard Keynes consistently offered qualified endorsement of Abba Lerner’s “functional finance” doctrine—the qualifications particularly turning on Keynes’s attentiveness to policy management of the psychology of the debt market. This article examines Keynes’s understanding of the possible influence of public debt on interest rates, from 1930 forward. With the multiplier a mechanism whereby debt-financed public investment generates matching private saving (net of private investment) plus public saving, it becomes possible for Keynes to conclude that increasing public debt need not place upward pressure on the level of interest rates, so long as policy can successfully manage the psychology of the debt market. This particularly concerns long interest rates and hence the term structure of rates. His theory of the term structure enables Keynes’s conviction that policy can manage and shape long rates. The conclusion considers also whether Keynes’s caution concerning public debt and interest rates retains relevance today.

scholarly journals Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Limits to Arbitrage and Interest Rates: A Debate Between Keynes, Hawtrey and Hicks

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy BRILLANT
Keyword(s):  
Business Cycle ◽  
Central Bank ◽  
Interest Rates ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Limits To Arbitrage ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Business Cycle

This paper deals with a debate between Hawtrey, Hicks and Keynes concerning the capacity of the central bank to influence the short-term and the long-term rates of interest. Both Hawtrey and Keynes considered the central bank’s ability to influence short-term rates of interest. However, they do not put the same emphasis on the study of the long-term rates of interest. According to Keynes, long-term rates are influenced by future expected short-term rates (1930, 1936), whereas for Hawtrey (1932, 1937, 1938), long-term rates are more dependent on the business cycle. Short-term rates do not have much effect on long-term rates according to Hawtrey. In 1939, Hicks enters the controversy, giving credit to both Hawtrey’s and Keynes’s theories, and also introducing limits to the operations of arbitrage. He thus presented a nuanced view.

The Pragmatic Basis of Keynes's Political Economy

1946 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dudley Dillard
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Widespread Adoption ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second World

Although we still live in the shadow of the years between the First and the Second World Wars, already it seems quite clear that future historians of economic thought will regard John Maynard Keynes as the outstanding economist of this turbulent period. As one writer has recently said, “The rapid and widespread adoption of the Keynesian theory by contemporary economists, particularly by those who at first were highly critical, will probably be recorded in the future history of economic thought as an extraordinary happening.” Book after book by leading economists acknowledges a heavy debt to the stimulating thought of Lord Keynes. The younger generation of economists, especially those whose thinking matured during the great depression of the thirties, have been particularly influenced by him.

Book Reviews

2011 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 727-728
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
Professor Emeritus ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
New York University ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
History Of

William J. Baumol of New York University and Princeton University reviews “Economics Evolving: A History of Economic Thought” by Agnar Sandmo. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins “Revised and expanded English translation of Samfunnsokonomi--en idehistorie (2006). Presents a history of economic thought from the late eighteenth century to the 1970s. Discusses a science and its history; before Adam Smith; Adam Smith; the classical school--Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo; consolidation and innovation--John Stuart Mill; Karl Marx as an economic theorist; the forerunners of marginalism; the marginalist revolution--William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Leon Walras; Alfred Marshall and partial equilibrium theory; equilibrium and welfare--Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Vilfredo Pareto, and Arthur C. Pigou; interest and prices--Knut Wicksell and Irving Fisher; new perspectives on markets and competition; the great systems debate; John Maynard Keynes and the Keynesian revolution; Ragnar Frisch, Trygve Haavelmo, and the birth of econometrics; the modernization of economic theory in the postwar period; further developments in the postwar period; and long-term trends and new perspectives. Sandmo is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration. Index.”

John Neville Keynes: The Social Philosophy of a Late Victorian Economist

1995 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 266-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Tilman ◽  
Ruth Porter-Tilman
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Minor ◽  
The Impact

John Neville Keynes (1852–1949) is best known for fathering one of the most influential economists of our time, John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946). Yet in his own day he was a formidable logician1 and economist himself. Although overshadowed by his colleague Alfred Marshall, his Scope and Method of Political Economy (1891) is still considered a minor classic and read by specialists in the history of economic thought. Maynard Keynes's biographers have portrayed Neville as having a powerful influence on him, even if they have failed to detail the impact of the father's logic and economics on his famous son.

scholarly journals Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Antonio De Viti De Marco, the principle of minimum means, and political competition

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amedeo Fossati ◽  
Marcello Montefiori
Keyword(s):  
Public Debt ◽  
Economic Activity ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
Tax Incidence ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
State Factor

In contrast to the common maxims for good taxation, De Viti de Marco revolutionized public finance studies by placing collective economic activity within a theoretical framework, and trying to explain concrete fiscal phenomena, such as tax incidence or public debt. The polar cases of cooperative and monopolistic states and the state-factor of production are usually considered a characteristic of such a framework. Here, we remark that De Viti’s theory of the cooperative state appears grounded only on the principles of minimum means and of political competition, and on the assumption that individual income is a proxy of individual consumption of general public services. Thus, it appears that the characteristics might be unessential to the real core of his theoretical framework. Moreover, we claim that his theoretical framework was not actually applied in his explanation of concrete fiscal phenomena. Finally, we remark that he seldom employed marginal tools in his Principî.

scholarly journals Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Keynes, Mill, and Say’s Law: A Comment on Roy Grieve’s Mistaken Criticisms of Mill

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James C.W. Ahiakpor
Keyword(s):  
Interest Rates ◽  
Capital Investment ◽  
Full Employment ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
Classical Analysis ◽  
Relative Prices ◽  
Monetary Economy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Value Of Money

Employing different meanings of classical concepts of saving, capital, investment, and money, and incorrectly attributing the assumption of full employment of labor and a world of certainty to classical analysis, Keynes (1936) faulted Say’s Law as irrelevant to the real world. Roy Grieve (2016) ignores previous clarifications of Keynes’s misrepresentations and misunderstandings of Mill’s restatements of the law. He employs similar misrepresentations and misunderstandings of Mill’s explanations as Keynes. His model of Mill’s analysis is incapable of explaining how variations in relative prices, the value of money, and interest rates coordinate production, consumption and savings decisions in a monetary economy.

scholarly journals W. Stark, J.M. Keynes and the Mercantilists

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constantinos Repapis
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
General Theory ◽  
Sociology Of Knowledge ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
History Of

In this paper we investigate Werner Stark’s sociology of knowledge approach in the history of economic thought. This paper explores: 1) The strengths and weaknesses of Stark’s approach to historiography, 2) seeing how this can frame an understanding of mercantilist writings and, 3) develop a link between a pluralist understanding of economics, and the sociology of knowledge approach. The reason for developing this link is to extend the sociology of knowledge approach to encompass a pluralist understanding of economic theorising and, at the same time, clarify the link between context and economic theory. John Maynard Keynes’ practice of building narratives of intellectual traditions as evidenced in The General Theory is used to develop a position between an understanding of history of economic thought as the evolution of abstract and de-contextualized economic theorising and, the view of economic theory as only relevant within the social conditions from which it arose.

How Homo economicus lost her mind and how we can revive her

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter DeScioli
Keyword(s):  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
Homo Economicus ◽  
Economic Theories ◽  
Target Article ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mind ◽  
And Behavior

AbstractThe target article by Boyer & Petersen (B&P) contributes a vital message: that people have folk economic theories that shape their thoughts and behavior in the marketplace. This message is all the more important because, in the history of economic thought, Homo economicus was increasingly stripped of mental capacities. Intuitive theories can help restore the mind of Homo economicus.

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