Anticipations of the General Theory?: And Other Essays on Keynes

"On the eve of the centennial of the birth of John Maynard Keynes, this book examines the much-debated question of whether his greatest work--The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money--was an instance of Mertonian simultaneous scientific discovery. Soon after the publication of Keynes' work, claims that this was the case were advanced by the Stockholm school (as represented by Bertil Ohlin) and the Polish economist Michał Kalecki. In part I of this book, Don Patinkin--an eminent Israeli economist who has long been a student of Keynes' works--rejects these claims on the basis of a detailed examination of the relevant writings. Patinkin shows that the theoretical problems to which the Stockholm school and Kalecki devoted their attention largely differed from those of the General Theory and that, even when the problem addressed was similar, the treatment they accorded it was not part of their central messages... Part II presents a detailed critique of Keynes' theory of effective demand... Part III provides individual studies of Keynes' monetary theory and of the development of his policy thinking... Part IV analyzes the complex interactions between the two macroeconomic revolutions that took place in the 1930s: the theoretical revolution represented by Keynes' General Theory and the statistical revolution represented by the development of national income estimates by Colin Clark and Simon Kuznets."--book jacket.