ABSTRACT
In order to put the legacy of Keynes into perspective it is useful to start with his own legacy when he decided to become an economist in the early part of this century. As my own legacy too is relevant for how I see the issues, let me first mention it briefly. I started economics in 1950 at the University of Melbourne in a department which traditionally looked to Cambridge, England, for inspiration – Marshall, Pigou, Keynes, Piero Sraffa, Austin and Joan Robinson, Richard Kahn, Maurice Dobb and Dennis Robertson very quickly became familiar names to us. This was also a time when most Australian economists were enthusiastic Keynesians, both theoretically and with regard to economic policies in war and peace. My first contact with Keynes’s writings was not, though, with The General Theory but with the Tract on Monetary Reform (1923; 1971–9: IV). We were taken very thoroughly through this 1923 publication in our first year as undergraduates (if we had elected to take the honours papers in Economics I). I did not read The General Theory itself until the end of my first year. I can still recall the excitement and incomprehension which accompanied my first attempt to understand that most baffling but, I still think, extraordinarily profound and important book. I also read Harrod’s ‘life’ and formed the ambition to do a Ph.D. at what I had come to regard as the true Mecca of economists: King’s College, Cambridge. Since those early days I have had the good fortune to have been taught by, and worked with, that unique first generation of Keynesians, those who were either Keynes’s pupils or his colleagues (or both). To the list above (and excluding Marshall and Pigou) I should therefore add David Champernowne, James Meade, Brian Reddaway and Richard Stone. I have also spent much of my working life puzzling about those aspects of Keynes’s legacy of which I wish to speak today. With the understanding of these puzzles I have been much helped over many years by enthusiastic and able Australian Keynesian colleagues at Adelaide, notably the late Eric Russell, Peter Karmel and Bob Wallace.
