Chapter 2. Postulates of Keynesian Economics
What is the Classical Theory of Employment?
Chapter 2 of the General Theory is called The Postulates of the Classical Economics.
Most treatises on the theory of value and production, Keynes begins, are primarily concerned with the distribution of a given volume of employed resources between different uses and with the conditions which determine their relative rewards.
But the pure theory of what determines the actual employment of the available resources has seldom been examined in great detail.
I doubt whether this factual statement can be supported.
Many treatises before 1936 had explained in great detail how labor and other resources
may come to be idle, and how goods already produced may long remain unsold, because of
the rigidity or stickiness of some wages or prices, i.e. because of the refusal of unions
The Classical Theory of Employment, supposedly simple and obvious, has been based, Keynes thinks, on two fundamental postulates, though practically without discussion, page 5.
The first of these is 1. The wage is equal to the marginal product of labor.
Page 5.
This postulate is correctly and clearly stated.
It is not, of course, part of the classical theory of employment.
That adjective should be reserved in accordance with custom and in the interests of precision
for Theory Prior to the Subjective Value or Marginalist Revolution of Jevons and Menger.
But the postulate has become part of orthodox theory since its formulation by the Austrian School,
and particularly in America by John Bates Clark.
Having written this simple postulate, Keynes adds eight lines of explanation
Explanation, which are amazingly awkward and involved, and do more to obfuscate than to clarify.
He then proceeds to state the second alleged fundamental postulate of the Classical Theory of Employment,
to wit, 2.
The utility of the wage, when a given volume of labor is employed, is equal to the marginal
disutility of that amount of employment.
Employment, page 5.
He adds as part of his explanation, disutility must be here understood to cover every kind
of reason which might lead a man, or a body of men, to withhold their labor rather than
accept a wage which had to them a utility below a certain minimum.
Page 6 This utility is here so broadly defined as to be almost meaningless. It may be seriously
doubted in fact whether this whole second fundamental postulate, as Keynes frames and
explains it, is or ever was a necessary part of the classical or traditional theory of
of Employment. Keynes does name, and later quote, as one whose theories rested on it.
Yet it may be seriously questioned whether this second postulate is representative of
any substantial body of thought, particularly in the complicated form that Keynes states
it.
The orthodox marginal theory of wages and employment is simple.
It is that wage rates are determined by the marginal productivity of workers, that when
employment is full, wage rates are equal to the marginal productivity of all those seeking
work and able to work, but that there will be unemployment whenever wage rates exceed
this marginal productivity.
Change rates may exceed this marginal productivity either through an increase in union demands
or through a drop in this marginal productivity.
The latter may be caused either by less efficient work or by a drop in the price of or demand
for the products that workers are helping to produce.
That is all there is to the theory in its broadest outlines.
The second postulate, in the form stated by Keynes, is unnecessary and unilluminating.
Subject to certain qualifications, Keynes contends, the volume of employed resources
is duly determined according to the classical theory by the two postulates which Keynes
has named.
The first gives us the demand schedule for employment.
The second gives us the supply schedule, and the amount of employment is fixed at the point where the utility of the marginal product balances the disutility of the marginal employment, page 6.
Is this indeed the classical theory of employment?
The first postulate that the wage is equal to the marginal product of labor does not
merely give us the demand schedule for labor, it tells us the point of intersection of both
the demand schedule and the supply schedule.
The demand schedule for workers is the wage rate that employers are willing to offer for
workers.
The supply schedule of workers is fixed by the wage rate that workers are willing to take.
This is not determined, for the individual worker, by the disutility of the employment,
at least not if disutility is used in its common sense meaning.
Many an individual unemployed worker would be more than willing to take a job at a rate
below a given union scale, if the union members would let him, or if the union leader would
consent to reduce the scale.
But we can return to this subject later.
After all, Keynes is not here stating his own theory.
He is merely giving a garbled version of the orthodox theory.
Further, according to Keynes, classical theory allows only for two possibilities, frictional unemployment and voluntary unemployment.
The classical postulates do not admit of the possibility of the third category, which I shall define below as involuntary unemployment.
Here is a classification that would trouble any logician. Unemployment must be either
voluntary or involuntary. Surely these two categories exhaust the possibilities. There
is no room for a third category. Frictional unemployment must be either voluntary or involuntary.
In practice it is likely to be made up of a little of each.
Frictional unemployment may be involuntary through illness, disability, failure of a
firm, unexpected cessation of seasonal work or discharge.
Frictional unemployment may be voluntary because a family has moved to a new place, because
As a man has relinquished an old job in the hope of getting a better one, because he thinks
he can get more pay than he is offered, or because he is taking a vacation between jobs,
such unemployment is the result of a decision, good or bad, on the part of the man who is
unemployed.
Friction, though a traditional term, is perhaps not the most fortunate metaphor to describe
One reason Keynes's thought is so often difficult to follow, above all in the general theory, is that he writes so badly, not withstanding the dithyrambic admiration of the lucidity, charm and brilliance of his style.
And one reason he writes so badly, at least in the general theory, is that he is constantly
introducing technical terms that are not only unnecessary but inappropriate and misleading.
Most of his worst terms are of his own coinage, but if someone else's term is sufficiently
Thus, at this point, he introduces the term wage goods industries, describing it as
Professor Pigot's convenient term for goods upon the price of which the utility of the money wage depends.
He then contrasts wage goods with non-wage goods.
This introduces a terminology that seems as needless as it is confusing.
Do wage goods mean anything essentially different from consumer goods?
Do non-wage goods mean anything essentially different from capital goods?
No doubt wage goods would not include mink coats or vias on the Riviera,
by Viviera, but the common sense of the reader might be trusted not to introduce these items
into an imaginary index of consumers' goods' prices.
It hardly seems necessary to invent a special term to keep them out.
This bad term is unfortunately continued throughout the general theory.
The reader is forced to translate it back each time into the familiar consumer's goods,
and to remind himself that it does not mean goods the production of which requires the
payment of wages.
Wage Rates and Unemployment
Section 2 of Chapter 2 is notable as the first attempt by Keynes in the general theory to
to disprove a fundamental proposition of traditional economics, that the most frequent cause of
unemployment is excessive wage rates. This, of course, for classical economics, is merely
the parallel of the proposition that the most frequent cause for an unsold surplus of a
commodity is the refusal of sellers to accept a price that will clear the market. If the
The proposition is not true with regard to labor, it is not true with regard to commodities
either.
Both propositions rest upon the same line of reasoning.
Both are special cases of a wider proposition covering both commodities and services.
It is instructive to notice that Keynes never challenges this proposition head-on or by
and any coherent and clear-cut argument.
He attacks it, rather, by a series of oblique sallies in which the argument is usually involved
and obscure and often clearly fallacious.
He begins by contending that labor is usually more interested in its money-wage than in
its real wage.
Ordinary experience tells us beyond doubt that a situation where labor stipulates within
limits for a money wage rather than a real wage, so far from being a mere possibility,
is the normal case.
Whilst workers will usually resist a reduction of money wages, it is not their practice to
withdraw their labor whenever there is a rise in the price of wage goods.
page 9.
So far as the United States is concerned, and, I suspect, so far as nearly every industrially
advanced country is concerned, this contention is already obsolete.
The big American unions all have their economists and directors of research who are acutely
aware of the monthly changes in the official consumer price index.
Because of January 1958, more than 4 million workers, moreover, mainly in the heavy industries
– steel, automobiles, railroads – had insisted on and secured contracts providing
for automatic wage increases with increases in the cost of living.
So while it is true that unions will resist a fall in money wage rates, even if it is
Even if Keynes's contention, moreover, had been factually true, it would still have been irrelevant to the classical contention.
The classical contention is that if wage rates, whether considered in terms of money wage rates or real wage rates, are above the level of the marginal productivity of labor, there will be unemployment.
Why is Keynes so concerned to make this point about labor's attitude toward money wage rates and real wage rates respectively?
The collectivist word labor implies that we need not think in terms of what individual workers would wish or do, but only in terms of what union monopolists wish or do.
He is concerned because he will be later eager to prove that while it is impossible to persuade unions to accept a cut in money wage rates,
it will be easy to deceive them into accepting a cut in real wage rates by the simple process of monetary inflation, erosion of the purchasing power of the monetary unit.
It will be noticed that even this argument, however, tacitly accepts the classical contention that the chief reason for unemployment is the existence of wage rates above the point of labor's marginal productivity.
Moreover, Keynes goes on to maintain, the contention that the unemployment which characterizes a depression is due to a refusal by labor to accept a reduction of money wages is not clearly supported by the facts.
It is not very plausible to assert that unemployment in the United States in 1932 was due either to labor obstinately refusing to accept a reduction of money wages, or to its obstinately demanding a real wage beyond what the productivity of the economic machine was capable of furnishing.
page 9
The reader will notice that there is no argument here, merely assertion.
It is not very plausible.
That is, it is not very plausible to Keynes, which proves nothing.
Most of us require something more than ex cathedra pronouncements.
A trick that Keynes uses here and elsewhere is the attempt to discredit a doctrine by overstating it.
The causes of the 1929 crisis and of the Depression from 1930 to 1940 were complex.
I shall not try to go into all of them here.
But I do not know of any serious economist who maintained or maintains that the initiating cause of the 1929 crisis was excessive wage rates.
What responsible economists did and do assert is that once the crisis had developed,
and demand and prices had collapsed, it was necessary for wage rates to adjust themselves to the reduced level of demand and of prices if mass unemployment was to be averted.
It was the failure of this wage adjustment to occur that led to prolonged mass unemployment for ten years.
The insistence of unions on excessive wage rates, it is true, may not always be a full explanation of total unemployment at any given time, but it is always part of the explanation.
Though it is not always a sufficient cause, it cannot be dismissed also, as Keynes dismisses it, as a necessary cause.
Rigidity or stickiness of contractual interest rates and rents, or unusual uncertainty or fear among buyers and consumers, may also be causes.
But they are likely to be temporary causes.
The longer mass unemployment is prolonged, the more warranted we are in assigning excessive wage rates as the dominant cause of it.
Even Keynes feels the need for offering reasons why he finds the attribution of unemployment to excessive wage rates not very plausible.
But the reasons he offers are either fallacious or contrary to established fact.
In explanation of the passage I have just quoted, he goes on,
and apparent change either in the minimum real demands of labor or in its productivity.
Labor is not more truculent in the depression than in the boom, far from it, nor is its
physical productivity less.
These facts from experience are a prima facie ground for questioning the adequacy of the
classical analysis.
Page 9
Are they?
This has here tumbled into a glaring fallacy.
The absence of change in physical productivity is completely irrelevant to money wage rates.
What counts in economics is only value productivity, and value productivity stated in this case, of course, in monetary terms.
If the marginal productivity of a worker is a given unit of a commodity that previously sold for $10 and the price of that unit has now fallen to $5,
then the marginal value productivity of that worker, even though he is turning out the same number of units, has fallen by half.
If we assume that this fall in prices has been general and that this represents the average fall, then the worker who insists on retaining his old money wage rate is in effect insisting on a 100% increase in his real wage rate.
Whether the worker is truculent or not is entirely beside the point.
If prices fall by 50% and unions will accept a wage cut but of no more than 25%,
then the unions are, in effect, demanding an increase in real wage rates of 50%.
The only way they can get it and retain full employment is by an increase of 50% in their physical, or real value, marginal productivity to make up for the drop in the price of the individual unit of the commodity they helped to produce.
The passage I have just quoted is in itself prima facie ground for questioning the adequacy of the whole Keynesian analysis.
It would be interesting to see the results of a statistical inquiry, writes Keynes, into the actual relationship between changes in money wages and changes in real wages, pages 9 through 10.
But, without waiting for the results, he proceeds to tell the reader what they would be.
When money wages are rising, it will be found that real wages are falling.
And when money wages are falling, real wages are rising.
Page 10.
The second half of this statement is historically correct.
The first half, in the modern world, is demonstrably not correct.
The statistical results which Keynes expressed such an interest in seeing already existed,
but he did not bother to look them up.
Let us cite a few.
In the 18-year period between 1939 and 1957, weekly wages in manufacturing in the United
States rose from $23.86 in 1939 to $82.39 in 1957, an increase of 245%.
This compared with an increase in the official consumer price index for the same period of
only 102%, making an increase in real weekly wages in the period of 71%.
The comparison is not very different if we take hourly wage rates as the base of comparison
instead of weekly wages.
These rose from $0.63 an hour in 1939 to $2.07 in 1957, an increase of 229%.
In other words, when money wages were rising in this period, real wages were also rising.
Whatever historical foundation there may be for the traditional belief that in an inflation
When prices rise first and wages lag behind, the proposition has not been true for the
United States or for many other countries in the last 20 years.
The second half of Keynes's proposition, that when money wages are falling, real wages
are rising, is, however, generally true.
It is not easy to find in American statistical history extensive periods when money wages
were falling, but two such periods do exist in recent times, between 1920 and 1922, and
between 1929 and 1933.
I append a comparison for a selected series of years taken from a table published by the
The Government comparing average hourly earnings of workers in manufacturing industries in current prices, i.e. in terms of the actual money wage rates paid, and in 1954 prices, i.e. in terms of real wage rates, or money wage rates expressed in terms of a dollar of assumed constant purchasing power.
In the year 1920, current prices were 0.555 dollars. 1954 prices were 0.743 dollars.
In the year 1921, current prices were 0.515 dollars. 1954 prices 0.773 dollars.
In the year 1922, current prices were 0.487 dollars. 1954 prices were 0.780 dollars.
In the year 1923, current prices were 0.522 dollars. 1954 prices 0.822 dollars.
In the year 1924, current prices were $0.547. 1954 prices $0.859.
In the year 1929, current prices were $0.566. 1954 prices were $0.886.
In the year 1930, current prices were $0.552, 1954 prices $0.887.
In the year 1931, current prices were $0.515, 1954 prices $0.910.
In the year 1932, current prices were $0.446. 1954 prices were $0.876.
In the year 1933, current prices were $0.442. 1954 prices $0.917.
In the year 1934, current prices were $0.532, 1954 prices $1.68.
Let us look first at the period from 1920 to 1924.
Between 1920 and 1922 there was a substantial drop in money wage rates, yet they did not
not drop as much as consumer prices, and therefore real wage rates or wage rates in constant
dollars actually increased between 1920 and 1922.
Beginning in 1923, money wage rates started up again, but real wage rates also rose, once
more refuting Keynes's proposition that when money wages are rising, it will be found that
that real wages are falling.
Take now the period between 1929 and 1934.
From 1929 to 1933, money wage rates fell, but real wage rates rose.
There was a sole exception between the years 1931 and 1932, but it did not change the comparative
of Trend over the whole period.
Between 1933 and 1934, however, there was a dramatic jump both in money wage rates and
in real wage rates, once more contradicting Keynes's law.
It is only fair to point out that this jump in both money and real wage rates in 1934
was the direct result of governmental intervention.
The National Recovery Administration's codes put into effect under government pressure
in the first years of the New Deal.
But it is precisely this jump in both money and real wage rates that helps to explain
the continuance of mass unemployment throughout the 30s.
This again is a statistical disproof of Keynes's central thesis that unemployment has nothing
to do with the height of wage rates, or even that unemployment is rather owing to wage
rates being too low than to their being too high.
From 1931 through 1939, both money wage rates and real wage rates rose.
Money wage rates rose from 51 cents an hour in 1931 to 63 cents in 1939.
In constant 1954 prices, real wage rates rose from 91 in 1931 to 122 in 1939.
What was the result?
In that 10-year period, there was an average annual unemployment of 10 million men and women.
Before we proceed further with a direct consideration of Keynes's argument on this point,
it may be more profitable to digress a moment to consider the kind of argument,
and particularly the set of assumptions, with which we have to deal.
It is pertinent here to make three observations.
One, when Keynes writes about classical theory or traditional theory, it almost invariably
turns out that what he is discussing is neither of these, strictly speaking, but some caricature
or the specific theories of the Cambridge School, consisting mainly of Marshall, Edgeworth
and Pigot, in which he was brought up.
2.
This school never quite rid itself of a cost-of-production theory of prices, and neither did Keynes.
3.
Keynes is even inferior to the Cambridge economists he criticizes in his addiction to lump-thinking
Thinking in Block Thinking.
Once we recognize the existence of these assumptions in Keynes's thinking, we can economize our
detailed criticism.
We can ignore many of his criticisms of the theories of Marshall and Pigot, for example,
because those theories had already been superseded by the best economic thought long prior to
the appearance of the general theory.
And we need not waste too much time over Keynes's criticisms when we find that these themselves
rest on crude, lump thinking.
Keynes writes on page 11, for example,
The traditional theory maintains, in short, that the wage bargains between the entrepreneurs
and the workers determine the real wage.
Now, there is no such thing as the real wage. Neither is there any such thing as the general
level of money wages.
The wage, real or money, is a figment of the bad economist's imagination. It is a violent
over simplification that assumes away the thousands of differences in individual wages
and salaries that make up reality.
In the same way, the general level of wages, like the general level of prices, both of
which concepts are central to Keynes's thought, has no existence in reality.
It is a statistician's construct, a mathematical average which has a limited value in simplifying certain problems.
But it simplifies away some of the chief dynamic problems in economics.
The same relationship between an average of prices and an average of wages in two different periods
may conceal gross changes in the relationship of specific prices to specific wages.
It is precisely the latter that may be relevant to equilibrium or the lack of it,
to the health of specific industries, to full employment or to substantial unemployment.
The word level can give rise to an additional false assumption, that prices and wages rise
or fall evenly or uniformly.
It is precisely their failure to do so that creates most of the problems of inflation
or deflation.
It is also the failure of specific prices or wages to rise or fall as much as the average
that permits the continuous structural changes in production and in the labor force necessary
for continuous economic efficiency and progress.
Keynes writes on page 13,
There may be no method available to labor as a whole whereby it can bring the wage-goods
equivalent of the general level of money-wages into conformity with the marginal disutility
of the Current Volume of Employment.
There may exist no expedient by which labor as a whole can reduce its real wage to a given
figure by making revised money bargains with the entrepreneurs.
This will be our contention.
I shall not attempt here to analyze thoroughly this highly implausible contention.
It is enough to point out for the moment that labor does not act or do anything else as
a whole any more than business does.
Labor certainly doesn't set its wage rate.
There are thousands of different wage rates being set every working day, sometimes industry
Industry by Industry, more often Company by Company, or Union by Union, and most often
Individual by Individual.
Even an industry-wide union sets not a single uniform rate, but a complicated scale of rates
fixed by classifications.
The whole dilemma that Keynes presents, as we shall later see, exists not only in the
real world of economics, but in his own confused method of thinking.
No General Level of Wage Rates
Section 3 of Keynes' Chapter 2 is less than a page and a half in length, and yet it is
is so packed with fallacies and misstatements of fact, and these fallacies and misstatements
are so crucial to Keynes's whole theory, that it requires more than a page and a half
of analysis.
Keynes's argument in this section rests on three major confusions.
1.
The word wages is sometimes used in the sense of wage rates, and sometimes in the sense
of Wage Income or Total Payrolls.
There is no warning to the reader as to when the meaning shifts, and Keynes himself is
apparently unaware of it.
This confusion runs through the general theory and gives birth to a host of sub-confusions
and sub-fallacies.
Fallacies
2.
Labor is treated in a Marxian manner as a lumped total with a lumped interest opposed
to an equally lumped interest of entrepreneurs.
This kind of treatment overlooks both the frequent conflict of interest between different
groups of workers and the frequent identity of interest between workers and entrepreneurs
in the same industry or firm 3.
Keynes is constantly confusing the real interest of workers with their illusions regarding their
interests.
Take this strange sentence from page 14.
Any individual or group of individuals who consent to a reduction of money wages relatively
Relatively to others will suffer a relative reduction in real wages, which is a sufficient
justification for them to resist it.
To see how bad this argument is, let us try to apply it to commodities.
We would then have to say, for instance, that if wheat fell in price relatively to corn,
The wheat farmers would be justified in combining to refuse to accept the lower price.
If they did so, of course, they would simply leave part of their wheat unsold on the market.
The result of this would be to hurt both wheat farmers and wheat consumers.
In a free, fluid, workable economy, relative changes in prices are taking place every day.
There are as many gainers as losers by the process.
If the losers refused to accept the situation and kept their prices frozen or raised them
as much as the general level had risen, the result would merely be to freeze the economy,
restrict consumption and lower production, particularly of the goods that otherwise have
fallen relatively in price.
This is precisely what happens in the labor field when the members of a single union refuse
to accept a relative reduction of real wage rates.
By refusing to accept it, they do not, in fact, improve their position.
They merely bring about unemployment, particularly in their own ranks, and hurt their own interests
as well as those of the entrepreneurs who employ them.
Keynes remains blind to the most glaring fact in real economic life, that prices and wages
never, except perhaps in a totalitarian state, change uniformly or as a unit, but always
relatively.
It is individual prices and individual wages that go up or down and adjust to each other
After a given calendar year or month has closed, along comes a statistician and figures out
a new average.
If he is a bad statistician, he tells us that there has been such-and-such a change in the
average level of prices or wages.
Then, bad economists build false theories on this misleading terminology.
They reify this alleged level.
Their next step is to announce that if the wages or prices in a free economy do not act
in this completely uniform or lump way, there must be outrageous injustice going on, and
This means that there is sufficient justification for any group of workers to resist a relative reduction in real wage rates, even though by resisting it they merely create unemployment in their own ranks.
This is adding pseudo-ethics to pseudo-economics.
It is like telling a man that he is justified in cutting off his nose to spite his face.
It would be impracticable, Keynes continues, for any group of workers to resist every reduction of real wages, due to a change in the purchasing power of money which affects all workers alike, and in fact reductions of real wages arising in this way are not, as a rule, resisted unless they proceed to an extreme degree.
Page 14
The second part of this statement, as we have already seen, is contrary to the facts of the modern world.
Unions now insist on escalator contracts or wage boosts to offset changes as small as 1% in the cost of living index.
Nor is it ever true that a change in the purchasing power of money affects all workers alike.
Such a change in purchasing power is always accompanied and, partly caused by, increases in some wage rates.
Keynes's fallacy here arises once more from the crude supposition that the price level as a whole goes up in an inflation
while the wage level as a whole stays where it is.
Statistical averages may sometimes make this seem to happen,
but this is precisely because mirror averages hide the real diversity and dispersions of the economic process.
Keynes is constantly falling into this fallacy of averages or aggregates.
His aggregate or macroeconomics is not a step in advance, it is a retrograde step which
conceals real relationships and real causation and leads him to erect an elaborate structure
of fictitious relationships and fictitious causation.
The effect of combination on the part of a group of workers, Keynes goes on, is to protect
their Relative Real Wage. The general level of real wages depends on the other forces
of the economic system. Thus it is fortunate that the workers, though unconsciously, are
instinctively more reasonable economists than the classical school. Inasmuch as they resist,
reductions of money wages, which are seldom or never of an all-around character, whereas
As They Do Not Resist Reductions of Real Wages, page 14
Notice first of all the semantics of the word protect.
The purpose and effect of unions, of course, is to increase the relative wage rates of
the union members as compared with other workers.
The general level of real wages is merely the composite average of individual wage rates.
It does not depend on the other forces of the economic system.
It depends on the calculations of statisticians.
Of course, any debasement of the monetary unit through inflation causes a rise in the
average of wages and prices.
But this occurs in actuality through a different, though sometimes only slightly different,
percentage rise in the price of each individual commodity or each individual wage rate.
The exchange ratio of wheat and corn is determined by the value both of a bushel of wheat and
of a bushel of corn, and never merely by the value of one of them.
A monetary price or wage rate is determined both by the exchange value of the monetary
unit and the exchange value of a unit of a commodity or service, and not merely by the
value of the monetary unit alone.
Finally, the ironical remark about workers being more reasonable economists than the classical
School is based on a misconception both of how wages change and how classical economists
think.
No reductions of wages, except those that might be imposed by an authoritarian government,
are ever of an all-round character.
If the economy is free, individual wage rates vary as much as individual prices, and there
There is great dispersion both when they go up and when they go down.
Non-Euclidean Economics
Sections 4 and 5 of Keynes's chapter 2 are outstanding even in the general theory for
the involution and obscurity of their style, and for Keynes's remarkable propensity for
stating everything backwards.
He begins by telling us that classical theory does not admit even the possibility of involuntary
unemployment in the strict sense.
Whether this is true or not depends upon the definition we give to involuntary, and also
upon whether we interpret the word in relation to the plight of an individual worker or in
in relation to unions that insist on a given scale of wage rates and see to it by their methods of intimidation
not only that none of their own members, but nobody else, accepts employment below that wage rate.
But here is Keynes's own definition of involuntary unemployment.
Men are involuntarily unemployed if, in the event of a small rise in the price of wage-goods
relatively to the money-wage, both the aggregate supply of labor willing to work for the current
money-wage and the aggregate demand for it at that wage would be greater than the existing
volume of employment.
Page 15
It would be hard to imagine a definition more wordy, involved, or obfusc.
I have read it an indefinite number of times, and as nearly as I can make out, it means
simply this.
Men are involuntarily unemployed if an increase in prices relatively to wage rates would lead
to more employment.
As soon as we translate Keynes's statement into plainer English, its falsity becomes
evident.
Keynes's statement overlooks the fact that such an increase of employment would have
been brought about equally well by a lowering of money wage rates with commodity prices
remaining the same.
To recognize this possibility, however, would have been to recognize that the unemployment
was not in fact involuntary.
Keynes tries to dismiss the possibility by pretending, on quite unconvincing grounds,
that there would have to be a uniform and simultaneous reduction of wages throughout
the entire economic system to make this result possible.
But, as I have already pointed out, wages never do go up or down uniformly or simultaneously.
We shall not now spend further time over sections 4 and 5, though they are full of further involved and implausible propositions.
Keynes advises us that the theory of wages in relation to employment, to which we are here leading up, cannot be fully elucidated.
However, until Chapter 19 and its appendix have been reached,
Page 18. We, too, can wait for that chapter before we make any further analysis of Keynes's theory on this point.
Before leaving these sections, however, it is worth taking note of an extravagantly pretentious claim that has apparently taken in some of Keynes's more fervent disciples.
The classical theorists, he writes, resemble Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world
who, discovering that in experience straight lines apparently parallel often meet, rebuke
the lines for not keeping straight.
Yet, in truth, there is no remedy except to throw over the axiom of parallels and to work
out a non-Euclidean geometry.
Something similar is required today in economics, page 16.
If we are to talk in these pretentious terms, I should like to suggest that the real economic
world in which we live is, after all, pretty Euclidean, and that we had better stick to
sound Euclidean economics in describing it.
It is precisely Keynes, as we shall find, who starts rebuking the real economic world
for not acting according to his theories, as when he contends, for example, against all
experience under free economies, that wage rates ought to go up or down to adjust themselves
to the price level, uniformly and simultaneously, or not at all.