ABSTRACT
"A higher absolute level of income will tend, as a rule, to widen the gap between income and consumption," Keynes began his argument. "For the satisfaction of the immediate primary needs of a man and his family is usually a stronger motive than the motives towards accumulation, which only acquire effective sway when a margin of comfort has been attained." The Keynesian conception of the income-consumption/saving relation breaks down. Keynes never made the effort to prove the proportionality of the consumption gap that his conclusions required. In The General Theory itself Keynes could test his ideas against earlier research by the pioneering economic statisticians Colin Clark and Simon Kuznets. Keynes had to content himself with a cautious reading. He found the Kuznets figures "very precarious." Keynes had assumed that income as received during a given period under examination was the only significant factor in determining consumption spending: the absolute income hypothesis.
