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by George H. Blackford Ph. D. (Author)
In the Preface to The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes wrote: "The composition of this book has been for the author a long struggle of escape, and so must the reading of it be for most readers if the author's assault upon them is to be successful, -a struggle of escape from habitual modes of thought and expression. The ideas which are here expressed so laboriously are extremely simple and should be obvious. The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds." (1936, p. viii) It is argued below that the failure of policy makers to escape the old and accept the new led to the adoption of economic policies over the past forty-five years that culminated in the Crash of 2008 and the economic stagnation that followed. It is further argued that this failure arose from an inability to appreciate the role of Marshall in the development of Keynes' thought. I find Keynes' simple ideas to be easily understood from the perspective of Marshall and beyond the ken of the Walrasian paradigm of neoclassical economics that underlies the worldview of policy makers. While the primary purpose of this monograph is to provide a definitive explanation of the way in which the rate of interest is determined and to explain the connection between the central thesis of The General Theory and the economic problems we face today, the manuscript is written in such a way as to explain Keynes' general theory from the perspective of Marshall. As such, it is a primer on The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, directed toward economics students in the hope that it will facilitate their ability to go beyond the Walrasian perspective of Neoclassical economics to gain a deeper understanding of Keynes and of the way in which the economic system actually works in the real world.
