A grande estagnação que nunca apareceu

Quotation of the Day…

by Don Boudreaux on September 1, 2012

in Myths and Fallacies, State of Macro, Stimulus

… is from pages 275-276 of John H. Williams’s May 1948 American Economic Review essay “An Appraisal of Keynesian Economics“ (ellipses original to Williams’s essay; Williams’s quotation of Keynes is from page 31 of Keynes’s The General Theory):

It was not a coincidence, or a misinterpretation of Keynes, that the first great development of the theory by his disciples was the stagnation thesis, that the war was regarded as a superlative demonstration of what could be accomplished to sustain employment by a really adequate volume of effective demand, and that the weight of expectation of Keynesian economists was that we would relapse after the war into mass unemployment unless vigorous antideflation measures were pursued. There is no better short statement of the stagnation thesis than that given by Keynes: “The richer the community, the wider will tend to be the gap between its actual and its potential production; and therefore the more obvious and outrageous the defects of the economic system…. Not only is the marginal propensity to consume weaker in a wealthy community, but, owing to its accumulation of capital being already larger, the opportunities for further investment are less attractive.”