ABSTRACT
The previous chapters have shown that most Keynesian economists of the first generation were unaware of the need for a precise definition of the concept of involuntary unemployment. As a result, they usually failed to draw a distinction between involuntary unemployment and underemployment. They were also prone to understand the notion of full employment in its common-sense, instead of its theoretical, meaning. The aim of this chapter is to verify whether these flaws are also discernible in the macroeconomic textbooks that gradually came to flourish. Being unable to engage in a systematic study of a large number of textbooks, I will content myself with a small sample of them. It consists of Ackley’s Macroeconomic Theory (1961), Dernburg and McDougall’s Macroeconomics (1963) and Allen’s Macroeconomic Theory (1967).
