Must-Read: John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

Must-Read: John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money: “The austere view, which would employ a high rate of interest to check at once any tendency in the level of employment to rise appreciably above the average of; say, the previous decade…

…is, however, more usually supported by arguments which have no foundation at all apart from confusion of mind.

It flows, in some cases, from the belief that in a boom investment tends to outrun saving, and that a higher rate of interest will restore equilibrium by checking investment on the one hand and stimulating savings on the other. This implies that saving and investment can be unequal, and has, therefore, no meaning until these terms have been defined in some special sense.

Or it is sometimes suggested that the increased saving which accompanies increased investment is undesirable and unjust because it is, as a rule, also associated with rising prices. But if this were so, any upward change in the existing level of output and employment is to be deprecated. For the rise in prices is not essentially due to the increase in investment: it is due to the fact that in the short period supply price usually increases with increasing output, on account either of the physical fact of diminishing return or of the tendency of the cost-unit to rise in terms of money when output increases. If the conditions were those of constant supply-price, there would, of course, be no rise of prices; yet, all the same, increased saving would accompany increased investment. It is the increased output which produces the increased saving; and the rise of prices is merely a by-product of the increased output, which will occur equally if there is no increased saving but, instead, an increased propensity to consume. No one has a legitimate vested interest in being able to buy at prices which are only low because output is low.

Or, again, the evil is supposed to creep in if the increased investment has been promoted by a fall in the rate of interest engineered by an increase in the quantity of money. Yet there is no special virtue in the pre-existing rate of interest, and the new money is not ‘forced’ on anyone: it is created in order to satisfy the increased liquidity-preference which corresponds to the lower rate of interest or the increased volume of transactions, and it is held by those individuals who prefer to hold money rather than to lend it at the lower rate of interest.

Or, once more, it is suggested that a boom is characterised by ‘capital consumption’, which presumably means negative net investment, i.e. by an excessive propensity to consume. Unless the phenomena of the trade cycle have been confused with those of a flight from the currency such as occurred during the post-war European currency collapses, the evidence is wholly to the contrary. Moreover, even if it were so, a reduction in the rate of interest would be a more plausible remedy than a rise in the rate of interest for conditions of under-investment.

I can make no sense at all of these schools of thought; except, perhaps, by supplying a tacit assumption that aggregate output is incapable of change. But a theory which assumes constant output is obviously not very serviceable for explaining the trade cycle…