ABSTRACT
These are Mr. Keynes's most fundamental points of advocacy. But perhaps most attention of all will be popularly focused on his views about wages. For he reduces to sheer absurdity the prevalent view that lower wages are a cure for unemployment. He begins by pointing out that this view rests on a fundamental confusion of thought between money wages and real wages. It assumes that, broadly, these can be spoken of
*The New Statesman and Nation, (February 15, 1936): 220-222
REVIEW: Horace Taylor (1936)*
Unemployment, the most conspicuous and most painful symp-
I hope that this summary is not so inadequate as to be unfair to Mr. Keynes. His entire analysis is hedged about with technical exceptions and special considerations. Yet his central theme, while it runs in terms of pure theory, would scarcely serve as a central theme if it were so qualified as to have a significant meaning only in highly exceptional circumstances. One or two of the special considerations must be mentioned. Mr. Keynes recognizes and stresses the conventional and habitual addiction people have to high rates of interest-- "John Bull can stand many things, but he cannot stand two percent." This consideration, added to certain administrative necessities, leads Mr. Keynes to "conclude that the duty of ordering the current volume of investment cannot safely be left in private hands." Such ordering of investment at low rates of interest clearly would require that the state do the investing. Again, when faced with the theoretical imperative of the under-consumption theorists that expenditures for consumption must be increased and savings for investment diminished, Mr. Keynes gives it as his practical judgment that both should be increased. Such a judgment would set the task of the monetary and credit authority.
