J.M. Keynes’s Bad Habit: A Critique of his Correspondence Style Based on the Hicks-Keynes Exchange Over the General Theory in 1936-37

Over the course of his lifetime, Keynes developed the very bad habit, in his correspondence, of not correcting, or even mentioning, the technical errors/mistakes made by his correspondents. Keynes would only actively defend the ideas that he had put forth in his A Treatise on Probability, A Treatise on Money and General Theory. This approach of Keynes usually led to the belief that Keynes’ analysis was only intuitive. Later generations of economists then incorrectly concluded that Keynes’ technical apparatus was defective. This is illustrated in the Hicks Keynes correspondence of 1936-1937.