Macroeconomics Reader

Rating:
Summary: Too many "Interpreting Keynes" articles
Review: Snowden and Vane provide the reader with a potpourri of different articles representing most of the existing schools of macroeconomic thought,ranging from Old Keynesian to New Keynesian,Monetarist,New Classical,Rational Expectations and Real Business cycle theorists.The major problem the editors and authors of these republished academic journal articles face is that they all either believe that Keynes provided no mathematical model of his theory of effective demand in the General Theory(GT) or they believe that there is a mathematical model specified but,based on the claims of Joan Robinson,Austin Robinson and Richard Kahn,there are many mathematical errors running through the GT.It is easily demonstrated that both views are incorrect.This brings us to Part I of this book ,which deals with the"What did Keynes(really)mean"literature.All of the contributions are flawed.This includes the articles by Coddington,Patinkin,Gerrard,and Tobin.All of these authors are unable to integrate any of Keynes's derivatives.Taking the antiderivative automatically would allow any mathematically literate economist to know exactly what Keynes meant because one would obtain the basic functions of Keynes's model of the GT.Consider the derivative specified by Keynes on pp.55-56 ,footnote 2 of the GT.It is that dZ/DN=w .Simple integration yields Z=wN+P,where P is the constant of Integration.Now Keynes specifies that D=pO four times on pp.282-285 of the GT.p is defined to be an expected price.O=F(N),where N equals total employment and O equals real output.P is defined five times on pp.282-285 as being expected profit.In chapter 3,Keynes states that setting D=Z is what the GT is all about.It is obvious that pO=wN+P or that P=pO-wN.Neither Patinkin,who dealt with this same footnote in five other journal articles and 3 books,Coddington,Gerrard,or Tobin,or any economist since 1936 has used simple integration to solve the"What did Keynes Really(really) Mean? "debate."Gerrard spends his entire time "interpreting the interpretations."He could have solved the entire question in 60 seconds by simple integration.