ABSTRACT
John Maynard Keynes suggests that his arguments in support of secular stagnation were half-hearted – a mere “obiter dictum,” rather than an adequate defense. In his lecture, Keynes presented a macroeconomic-empirical argument in defense of the existence of secular stagnation in the current era, something he had not to the author's knowledge done before. Keynes introduced a macro demand-for-capital-goods relation or function. “The demand for capital depends, of course, on three factors: on population, on the standard of life, and on capital technique” Keynes stressed the crucial impact of population growth on the demand for capital goods. Keynes stated that the demands for capital goods will, ceteris paribus, “increase more or less in proportion to population, and the progress of invention may be relied on to raise the standard of life. But the effect of invention on “the period of production depends on the type of invention which is characteristic of the age.”
