ABSTRACT
The economic society whose affairs depend on its valuations of desirable equipment can perhaps be suggestively labelled kaleidic. Kaleidic economics would adopt and exploit consciously the method to which the General Theory was in its practice constrained by circumstance and by its author's insights. John Maynard Keynes wrote the General Theory against the background of what seemed like a settled condition of under-employment, rather than the depression phase of the business cycle. Keynes's formal, momentary equilibria no doubt have something in common with Alfred Marshall's conception of 'the normal'. Marshall's normal is an implication of a set of data, the answer to a sum, not necessarily ever attained in practice or visible reality. A Keynesian equilibrium may have meant for Keynes a set of mutually consistent goals visible, in its character of a configuration, to many of those with power to decide upon large-scale action.
