Economics, Keynesian

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Keynesian economics is the approach to macroeconomics that grew out of John Maynard Keynes’s work, especially his The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) written during the Great Depression. Since Keynes’s work has been interpreted in different ways and inspired various formulations of macroeconomics, it is defined in a number of different ways, including the approach to macroeconomics in which: aggregate demand plays a major role in determining output and employment; involuntary unemployment can persist; and fiscal and monetary policy can affect the level of output and employment. Keynes himself recognized that he had a number of predecessors, and it has been suggested that major elements of his approach were anticipated by others (most notably, Michal Kalecki).

In The General Theory Keynes argued that employment is determined by the aggregate demand for goods, which is in turn determined (in a closed economy) by consumption demand and investment demand. Consumption depends mainly on the level of real income while investment demand depends on the interest rate, which is determined by money supply and the demand for money, and by business expectations. Given expectations and monetary conditions, employment is determined so that output produced is equal to aggregate demand. The level of employment thus determined may be less than the full employment level at which the supply and demand for labor (which depend on the real wage) become equal. He also examined the aggregate supply side of the economy with a given money wage, and a production function relating output to employment, which determined the average price level. Keynes argued that the wages are likely to be rigid downward when unemployment exists because of the concern of workers with their wage relative to that of others: however, even if wages (and hence the price level) fall, it is unlikely to increase the level of aggregate demand in the face of uncertainty and the negative effect of falling prices on the demand for goods by debtors. Keynes therefore recommended expansionary monetary and especially fiscal policy to increase the level of aggregate demand, employment, and output to reduce unemployment.

Keynes’s analysis is most simply depicted with the income-expenditure model of Figure 1, in which the axes

measure income and output, Y, and expenditures or demand, E. The line marked C is the consumption function that shows the relation between consumption and real income, and the line marked C + I + G is aggregate demand that adds (planned) investment, I, and government expenditure, G, both assumed to be exogenously given, to it. Equilibrium output, Y_E, is determined where the aggregate expenditure line intersects the 45° line so that output equals expenditure. The level of output determines employment, which may imply unemployment. Fiscal and monetary expansion, by increasing G or I, can increase output and reduce employment.

Economists such as John Hicks and Franco Modigliani, who were persuaded by Keynes’s theory, tried to relate it to pre-Keynesian neoclassical macroeconomic theory in which the economy was generally thought to be at full employment. A series of models, including the IS-LM and later the aggregate demand–aggregate supply (AD-AS) models, were developed to produce what has come to be called the neoclassical synthesis approach to Keynesian economics. This approach, which uses different types of demand and supply curves and equilibrium condition as in neoclassical theory, implies that unemployment can exist, due to wage rigidity, in the short run, but in the medium and long runs, in which the wage is flexible, the economy is at full employment. When unemployment exists, over the medium and longer runs the money wage falls, which reduces the costs of firms and hence the price level, which reduces the nominal demand for money. The resulting excess supply of money is used to increase spending on goods (by what is called the real balance effect), or is lent out, implying a fall in the interest rate and a rise in investment (and possibly consumption) demand. This increase in aggregate demand increases out put and employment and takes the economy to full employment. With rigid wages in the short run, however, this mechanism does not work itself out, and unemployment can exist. Expansionary fiscal and monetary policy can increase output in the short run, but only increases the price level in the medium and long runs when the economy is at full employment.

In the 1960s, after most advanced countries experienced low unemployment for long periods (arguably due to the success of Keynesian macroeconomic policies), and inflationary pressures began to mount, alternative approaches to macroeconomics began to emerge. Three of them adopted positions opposed to Keynesian economics and can be briefly discussed to show what it is not. The first, monetarist, approach developed by Milton Friedman in 1968 and others returned to the pre-Keynesian idea of flexible wages in the short run, so that full employment always prevails, but allows changes in aggregate demand to affect the level of output and employment, because of misperceptions about the effects of aggregate demand changes, to make it consistent with the facts regarding business cycles. For instance, when money supply increases, workers find their money wage to be higher, but by not taking into account that the price of goods is higher too, they supply more labor, which leads to an increase in output. In the longer run, as workers revise their price expectation, this expansionary effect disappears. According to this approach, although full employment always prevails due to the flexibility of wages, macro policy has a temporary effect on real variables due to the misperceptions of the workers. The second also maintains the assumption of flexible, labor-market clearing wages, but assumes that economic agents do not make systematic expectational errors as they do in the earlier monetarist approach, and assumes rational expectations. This new classical approach developed by Robert Lucas in 1983 and others points out that with agents having rational expectations in the sense that they use all relevant information about the economy to calculate price expectations, fiscal and monetary policy (apart from tax policy changes that affect the supply of labor) are not effective even in the short run, unless the policies’ changes are random and hence unanticipated. The third approach, called the real business cycle approach, continues in this tradition, but explains business cycle fluctuations in terms of technology shocks that affect investment demand and the interest rate and bring about the intertemporal substitution of labor to explain changes in employment.

In addition to real-world phenomena mentioned earlier, Keynesian economics lost ground to these new classical approaches because of its alleged problem in providing proper microfoundations to macroeconomics. The neoclassical synthesis Keynesian approach explained unemployment in terms of wage rigidity, but did not relate the analysis to optimizing microfoundations. The new Keynesian approach tries to develop Keynesian economics to address this problem. An early branch of this approach merely introduced fixed prices and wages into the standard micro-founded general equilibrium model, examining disequilibrium situations in which actual transactions occurred at the “short” side of the market and the effects of such deviations from market clearing in one market spilled over into other markets. Another branch of the approach responded directly to the monetarist and rational expectations approaches, introducing wage price stickiness (such as staggered or sticky wage adjustment) into models with rational expectations to show that it is complete wage flexibility, rather than the assumption about expectations, that produced the policy ineffectiveness result. A final, and most popular new Keynesian branch, provided optimizing microfoundations to wage, price, and interest rate rigidity. Efficiency wages (which prevent the wage from falling when unemployment exists because of its adverse effect on labor efficiency) and wage bargaining, imperfect competition and the “menu” costs of price changes, and asymmetric information in credit markets have been used to explain these rigidities. Some models, such as those that distinguish the role of insiders and outsiders in the wage determination process, imply that aggregate demand changes can have long-term effects on output due to what are called hysteresis effects. While some new Keynesian models imply involuntary unemployment in equilibrium, others do not, but imply only that aggregate demand policies can have effects on output.

The central feature of both the neoclassical synthesis and new Keynesian approach is the rigidity of wages and prices. While wage rigidity is an important element of Keynes’s theory, we have seen that according to Keynes the wage flexibility is no guarantee for full employment. The fact that flexible wages may exacerbate rather than solve unemployment problems has been stressed by another approach to Keynesian economics, called the post-Keynesian approach, which emphasizes the implications of decision-making under uncertainty, monetary institutions, and the effect of income distribution on aggregate demand. According to this approach when the wage and price falls due to the existence of unemployment, the interest rate and real balance effects need not work to increase aggregate demand because an excess supply of money may just lead to a fall in money supply as loans are repaid in a credit money economy with no further effects on the interest rate, because even if the interest rate falls asset holders may wish to hold more money and firms unwilling to increase investment in an uncertain environment, and because falling real wages redistribute income from workers to profit recipients who save a larger proportion of their income. Greater wage flexibility also tends to increase uncertainty in the economy given the importance of wages for both firm costs and profits and household income. These ideas add to Keynes’s own discussion on the implications of wage flexibility, and are also corroborated by some optimizing models with a new Keynesian flavor.

Keynesian economics has generally been thought to be valid for short-run macroeconomics, but ignored in the analysis of long-run growth analysis. However, if wage flexibility does not automatically take the economy to full employment or at least the natural level of output consistent with price stability, and governments are unwilling or unable to do the same over the medium run, and if technology responds to aggregate demand and output, Keynesian economics may be relevant for the longer run as well. Post-Keynesians and other heterodox economists have, in fact, followed Joan Robinson and others in applying Keynesian economics to the study of long-run growth.

SEE ALSO Economics, New Keynesian; Economics, Post Keynesian; Kalecki, Michal; Keynes, John Maynard

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Clower, Robert. 1965. The Keynesian Counterrevolution: A Theoretical Appraisal. In The Theory of Interest Rates, ed. F. Hahn and F. P. R. Brechling. London: Macmillan.

Dutt, Amitava Krishna, and Edward J. Amadeo. 1990. Keynes’s Third Alternative? Aldershot: Edward Elgar.

Friedman, Milton. 1968. The Role of Monetary Policy. American Economic Review (March): 1–17.

Hahn, Frank, and Robert M. Solow. 1995. A Critical Essay on Modern Economic Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hicks, John R. 1937. Mr. Keynes and the Classics. Econometrica. 5 (2), 147–159

Kalecki, Michal. 1971. Selected Essays on the Dynamics of the Capitalist Economy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Keynes, John Maynard. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan.

Lucas, Robert E. B. 1973. Some International Evidence on Output-Inflation Tradeoffs. American Economic Review 63 (June): 326–334.

Mankiw, N. Gregory, and David Romer, eds. 1991. New Keynesian Economics. 2 vols. Cambridge: MA: MIT Press.

Modigliani, Franco. 1944. Liquidity Preference and the Theory of Interest and Money. Econometrica. 12 (1):45–88.

Robinson, Joan. 1961. Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth. London: Macmillan.

Amitava Krishna Dutt

KEYNESIANISM

KEYNESIANISM is a term that identifies both a school of economic theory and a distinctive approach to public policy. Regarding theory, it can be said that the English economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) invented modern macroeconomics with the publication in 1936 of his masterwork The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. That book shifted the focus of attention from the microeconomic actions of individuals and firms to the overall behavior of a capitalist economy.

Keynes argued that, contrary to the conventional wisdom embodied in Say's Law, the capitalist economy did not contain a self-correcting or homeostatic mechanism that would necessarily return it to a healthy equilibrium over the course of the business cycle. Rather, as the contemporaneous Great Depression seemed to demonstrate, a deficiency in effective demand could result in equilibrium at an intolerably high level of unemployment. In the Keynesian model, government policy to bolster aggregate demand, especially fiscal action (spending and taxing) to increase either consumption or the particularly volatile element of investment, could be used to drive an underperforming economy to full employment. Because of the so-called "multiplier effect" that Keynes invoked as a central element in his model, such action could have an ultimate economic impact several times larger than the magnitude of the government's initial corrective intervention.

In the period from World War II through the early 1970s, Keynesianism rose to ever greater influence as both a theory and a guide for public policy. The Keynesian analysis gained a prominent place in textbooks, and its terminology increasingly became the common language of both economists and policymakers. The experience of World War II, with its massive deficit spending, seemed to validate Keynes's approach, and the subsequent Cold War and the later expansion of social spending left the federal government with a sufficiently large presence in the U.S. economy to serve as a Keynesian lever. The size of postwar budgets meant that changes in federal spending and taxing had a powerful impact on the overall economy. Embraced most fervently by Democrats but influential also in Republican circles, the Keynesian policy approach gained its fullest expression in the liberal presidencies of the 1960s, most prominently in the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut of 1964. In 1965, Time magazine put Keynes's picture on its cover in a tribute to the influence of his economic vision.

With the onset of stagflation in the 1970s, Keynesianism began to lose influence both as a theory and as a policy. Unable to explain adequately the economic malaise of simultaneous stagnation and inflation, it came under theoretical assault by the monetarist and the rational expectations schools of economic thought. Suspected of being itself a primary contributor to inflation, Keynesianism was increasingly supplanted by policy approaches aimed more at the supply side of the economy.

At the end of the twentieth century, Keynesianism still provided much of the lingua franca of macroeconomics. However, both as a theory and as a policy, it lived on only in a much chastened and attenuated form, more a limited analysis and a special prescription for particular circumstances than the general theory Keynes had originally proclaimed it to be.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Collins, Robert M. More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Keynes, John Maynard. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. London: Macmillan, 1936.

Skidelsky, Robert. Keynes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Stein, Herbert. The Fiscal Revolution in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.

Robert M.Collins

See alsoEconomics ; Great Depression ; Reaganomics ; Supply-Side Economics .

KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS

The Crisis of Capitalism

Although a citizen of Great Britain, economist John Maynard Keynes had a tremendous impact on American business practices and in particular the role of the government in the economy. Keynes theorized that the Depression was not a result of overproduction, the most commonly given cause, but rather a problem of distribution. Although Keynes's ideas were initially rejected during the 1930s, in the 1940s they became widely accepted.

Priming the Pump

Essentially, Keynes argued, the Depression was caused by a shortage of money that made it difficult to move goods from one location to another. The cure, as he saw it, was for the government to prime the economy's pump with deficit spending. An increase in government spending without accompanying tax increases would put more money in circulation and start the economy moving again. His theories were first put before President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression, but at first Roosevelt rejected them because of his reluctance to use deficit spending to end the Depression. However, after the recession of 1936-1937 the Roosevelt administration halfheartedly adopted Keynesian economic policies. Before World War II the administration did not commit the nation to sufficient spending to end the Depression. In fact, Roosevelt had caused the economic slump by cutting spending in an effort to balance the budget. The result was increased unemployment and a slowing of the economy.

Acceptance

Prosperity returned to the United States in the 1940s because, as Keynes had predicted, federal spending for military programs had produced growing deficits. The massive amount of money the government spent to prepare for and fight World War II validated his ideas. During the 1940s many business leaders accepted a larger role for the government in the economy to provide economic stability and to prevent the return of another depression. Americans, largely because of the Cold War, accepted his prescription for deficit spending to stimulate the economy but did not subscribe to his belief that the government should have a budgetary surplus during good times to slow inflationary growth. This approach to government spending became known in economic circles as military Keynesianism. Yet another approach to Keynesian economics was to cut taxes without cutting spending. All of these approaches were widely accepted by government officials and enjoyed bipartisan support from the 1940s to the 1980s.

THE EMPLOYMENT ACT OF 1946

When Congress passed the Employment Act of 1946 it committed the federal government to the task of protecting and promoting the prosperity of the nation. The Employment Act marked the triumph of Keynesian economics in the United States, with political leaders committing the resources of the government to ensuring full employment for Americans. The fear that depression would return was an overriding concern of Americans during World War II. Economists, businessmen, and politicians all predicted the return of hard times once wartime demands for goods and labor ceased.

Source:

Robert M. Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, 1929-1964 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

Source:

Robert M. Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, 1929-1964 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

Keynesianism, an economic theory originally derived from the British economist John Maynard Keynes.In his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), written during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes challenged the orthodox view that market forces would necessarily bring about recovery. Rather, Keynes postulated that the historical evolution of capitalist economics limited the ability of private investment to stimulate renewed economic growth. Hence, public investment would be required to lift Western economies from an indefinite state of stagnation. American economists initially understood Keynes's analysis in this light.

In the climate of post–World War II prosperity, however, Keynesianism came primarily to be understood as a series of fiscal‐policy strategies: the use of government spending or tax reduction to boost a sagging economy; the introduction of government retrenchment or tax increases to cool an overheated one. Widely supported among U.S. economists, this contracyclical version of Keynesianism largely displaced the original formulation. Keynesianism thus evolved from a general theory repudiating laissez‐faire economic orthodoxy into a kit of policy tools. This revision of orthodox economic theory was dubbed the “neoclassical synthesis.”

During the 1970s, this post–World War II view of Keynesianism fell into disrepute. The simultaneous appearance of recession and inflation—labeled “stagflation”—rendered Keynesian fiscal tools ineffectual. Accordingly, the form of Keynesianism widely accepted after 1945 stood indicted as simpleminded, and younger economists by and large abandoned it. Other economists, however, worked to retrieve or develop a form of Keynesianism more in keeping with Keynes's original theoretical and policy intent: to save capitalism from a historical tendency toward long‐term stagnation and mass unemployment.
See also Business Cycle; Depressions, Economic; Economics; Monetarism; Monetary Policy, Federal; New Deal Era, The; Taxation.

Bibliography

Walter S. Salant , The Spread of Keynesian Doctrines and Practices in the United States, in The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism across Nations, ed. Peter A. Hall, 1989, pp. 27–51.

Theodore Rosenof

Keynesianism An economic theory developed by Keynes which holds that imperfections in the economy can be corrected through government policy. For example, if there is a recession, there is excess supply of goods over demand. The government can stimulate demand e.g. through welfare payments or employment schemes. As individuals thus receive higher incomes, their demand will increase. To finance these schemes, the government will have to raise more debts, which pushes up interest rates. This reduces supply because it becomes more expensive for producers to expand through loans, so that a government can increase demand and reduce supply until an equilibrium is re-established. Keynes' ideas formed the basis of economic policy in most industrialized nations after World War II, but fell out of fashion after the inability of Keynesian demand management to cope with the economic recession of the 1970s, when rising inflation coincided with rising unemployment. During the late 1970s and the 1980s, it was replaced as the dominant economic theory by monetarism. Concerns raised by the progress of globalization, however, have raised awareness about the potential costs of unbridled monetarism. They have led to demands of greater state intervention to prevent some of the possible insecurity and dislocation experienced by the losers of the market.

Keynesian economics An approach to economic theory and policy derived from the influential writings of the English economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946). Prior to Keynes, governments tended to be guided by the argument of laissez-faire economics that an unregulated economy would tend to move towards full employment, and thence equilibrium. Keynes argued (in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936) that equilibrium could be established before that point was reached, and therefore that governments wishing to achieve full employment had actively to intervene in the economy by stimulating aggregate demand; and, conversely, that if full employment resulted in inflation they should act to reduce aggregate demand, in both cases by using the devices of tax (fiscal) policy, government expenditure, and monetary policy (changes in interest rates and the supply of credit). Keynesianism, though forming the basis of economic policy in most Western societies for three decades after the Second World War, was itself challenged by the appearance of stagflation (simultaneous recession and inflation) in the 1970s, and consequently by the economic theories of monetarism. The dispute between these two approaches currently forms the major axis of disagreement within modern economics.