Riku Sayuj’s Reviews > The Cambridge Companion to Keynes > Status Update

It is difficult to remember that when the Great Depression hit in 1929, there were no figures for gross national product that could be used to compare output with the previous year. No one could say with authority just how much output had fallen.

#summary

"The grand political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice, and individual liberty."

Keynes is the only major economist who spent a substantial part of his life embedded (in all the meanings of that term) in a community of artists and creative writers. The most important of these for Keynes were members of the so-called Bloomsbury Group.

Today?
In the halcyon days before the First World War, the Brilliant Young were mainly concerned with their own feelings, and treated politics and the outside world with contempt. But anyone with experience of such societies knows that however much they profess individualism, there is an enormous pressure to conform with the prevailing ethos.

In Russell’s eyes, Keynes was a powerful ally of empirical rationalism. Both conceived of logic as more fundamental than mathematics.

Unlike Austrians (such as Menger and Mises), Keynes does not regard economic theory as a branch of pure logic; rather, like Marshall, he regards it as an instrument of inquiry into facts about causes.

The English idiom says, ‘I started the car’, not ‘I caused the car to start.’ But if the car stalls, it is perfectly idiomatic to say, ‘What caused it to stall?’
Keynes underscores the importance of a causal account.

can anyone come up with a good that exhibits unit elasticity of demand? students are demanding an example and i am not imaginative enough :)

Keynes is one of a handful of economists whose life was rich enough to warrant the extensive biographical treatment he has received.

Much of the ‘Keynes and philosophy’ literature starts with the early life. It explores the beliefs of Keynes and his friends as they were formed under Moore’s tutelage; it explores his relationships with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Frank Ramsey.