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With this revision, Mr. Keynes takes a big step back to Marshallian orthodoxy, and his theory becomes hard to distinguish from the revised and qualified Marshallian theories, which, as we have seen, are not new. Is there really any difference between them, or is the whole thing a sham fight? Let us have recourse to a diagram. (Hicks 1937, p. 153)

Though he presented his model as ‘a convenient synopsis of Keynesian theory’, and it was accepted as such by the majority of economists, Hicks later admitted that it was a Neoclassical, ‘general equilibrium’ model he had sketched out ‘before I wrote even the first of my papers on Keynes’ (Hicks 1981, p. 140).

The gap between what this model alleged was Keynesian economics, and the actual economics of Keynes, was enormous, as can readily be seen by comparing Hicks’s ‘suggested interpretation’ of Keynes, and Keynes’s own 24-page summary of his economics in ‘The General Theory of Employment’ (Keynes 1937), which was published two months before Hicks’s paper. The key passage in Keynes’s summary of his approach – which reflects the accusation he levelled at ‘classical economic theory’ above – is the following:

The theory can be summed up by saying that … the level of output and employment as a whole depends on the amount of investment … More comprehensively, aggregate output depends on the propensity to hoard, on the policy of the monetary authority, on … But of these several factors it is those which determine the rate of investment which are most unreliable, since it is they which are influenced by our views of the future about which we know so little.

This that I offer is, therefore, a theory of why output and employment are so liable to fluctuation. (Keynes 1937, p. 221, emphasis added)

Keynes’s summary of his theory asserts that the level of investment depends primarily upon investors’ expectations of the future, which are uncertain and ‘unreliable’. Hicks completely ignored expectations – let alone uncertainty – and instead, modelled investment as depending upon the money supply and the rate of interest: