ABSTRACT
John Maynard Keynes’s book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money received a relatively warm reception upon publication. The severity and length of the Great Depression was the main factor that determined reception to the book. The Depression made academics and policymakers more receptive to its ideas. Keynes’s 1933 book The Means to Prosperity had laid much of the groundwork for this, preparing policymakers for the notion of government intervention. Whereas this earlier work was effectively a set of policy proposals, The General Theory provided them with theoretical underpinnings. During the 1930s, in the US in particular, economists initially rejected the central ideas of Keynes’s work. Some have suggested that Keynes’s ideas were quickly watered down by those looking for consensus with classical economists. They further suggest that models such as the famous “IS-LM” model were a distortion of Keynes’s ideas, intended to stop divisions within the discipline.
