ABSTRACT
In Europe and America the 1930s were in part simply a continuation of the fashions and fads of the 1920s, for example the further progression of the art deco movement, but they also witnessed some new developments in various important fields of human endeavour. Regarding economic theory, in the UK J.M. Keynes published his avowedly revolutionary General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936, partly as a response to the great depression that followed the Wall Street crash. In this work Keynes pitted himself explicitly against what he characterised as Pigoutype neoclassical orthodoxy, eschewed notions of automatic marketgenerated equilibrium, and introduced new ideas into economics such as the marginal propensity to save/consume and the liquidity trap. A greater level of state intervention in the economy was the general policy recommendation. In the USA A.A. Berle and G.C. Means published their Modern Corporation and Private Property in 1932, a book that placed the faceless corporate system centre stage, with its centralised concentration of power and a separation of ownership from control. Also in the USA Irving Fisher developed his debt-deflation theory of the great depression in which over-indebtedness combined with deflation to produce a prolonged industrial stagnation.
