ABSTRACT
Paul Samuelson, who is regarded generally as the most important academic economist of the 20th century, was an early convert to Keynesian theory. He set out a reasonably complete viewpoint on macroeconomics (1940) that was presented at a conference in 1938. Samuelson considered two related questions: the timing of public expenditures and the optimal amount of cumulative public deficit over a period of time. John R. Hicks (1937) read the General Theory carefully and invented the graphical presentation that has been used to teach Keynes to students ever since. The implied interest rate for the income level at the high level of investment, given the supply of money, will be too high to sustain the high level of investment. The Meade model focuses on the conditions for external trade balance, i.e., balance in the current account. The government increases its spending on final goods and services.
