ABSTRACT
To any enquiry ‘what is economics?’, many students of Geoff Harcourt’s would give the reply that has a tradition going back to Smith, and, more pertinently, Ricardo: ‘it is the study of the accumulation of capital’. Many would add that one of the greatest puzzles is the link with effective demand and, within that, the role of the rate of interest in accumulation, thereby reflecting their debt to the Keynesian tradition Geoff Harcourt has carried forward at Cambridge.
