ABSTRACT
In the early 1920s the Douglas/New Age texts were considered sufficiently substantial to attract the attention of economists at Cambridge. R.F. Harrod reports a conversation between Keynes and the philosopher H.W.B. Joseph which took place in 1921. Keynes endorsed Joseph’s ‘long and complicated refutation of Douglas’ arguments’ as ‘the most clear and admirable exposure of Major Douglas’ fallacies I have ever heard’ (quoted in King 1988: 143). Meade later claimed (in an interview with one of the authors on 17 November 1993) that the Douglas texts were ‘an element’ in the development of Keynes’s theory of demand management, lending support to King’s (1988) view that in economics, as in other disciplines, the provenance of their author affects the acceptability of theories.
