Читать книгу The New Economics онлайн | страница 15

This brings us to what, from many points of view, is the most important thing in Mr. Keynes’ book. It is not only possible to show that a given supply of money determines a certain relation between Income and interest…; it is also possible to say something about the shape of the curve. It will probably tend to be nearly horizontal on the left, and nearly vertical on the right …

Therefore, … the special form of Mr. Keynes’ theory becomes valid. A rise in the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital only increases employment, and does not raise the rate of interest at all. We are completely out of touch with the classical world. (Hicks 1937, p. 154; see also Hicks 1935; 1981)8

The schism between Hicks’s purported model of Keynes and Keynes’s own views was so great that it gave rise to the key heterodox school of thought, ‘Post Keynesian Economics’. So ‘the Keynesian revolution’ didn’t happen, though Post Keynesians themselves have developed approaches to economics that are revolutionary (Eiteman 1947; Godley 1999; Goodwin 1967; Graziani 1989; Keen 2020b; Minsky 1977; Moore 1979; Sraffa 1926, 1960). But a revolution in mainstream economic thought, like the rejection of Ptolemy’s earth-centric vision of the solar system and its total replacement by Copernicus’s sun-centric vision, has not happened.

The above paints a bleak picture of the prospects of replacing Neoclassical economics with a fundamentally different and far more realistic paradigm. But there have been changes over time that make this more feasible now than it was at Keynes’s time.

Foremost here is the development of the computer, and computer software that can easily handle large-scale dynamic and even evolutionary processes (Gooding 2014). These developments have occurred outside economics, and especially in engineering, physics and meteorology. There are limitations of the applicability of these techniques to economics, largely because of the fact that economics involves human behaviour rather than the interaction of unconscious objects, but these limitations distort reality far less than the Neoclassical fantasy that economic processes occur in or near equilibrium.9


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