The Great Depression and Keynes’s <span class='italic'>General Theory</span>

Lawrence H. White

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511998218.006

5 - The Great Depression and Keynes’s General Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012

Lawrence H. White

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Lawrence H. White: Affiliation:
George Mason University, Virginia

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Summary

John Maynard Keynes corresponded with George Bernard Shaw for decades after meeting him at Cambridge. Shaw was not only a famous playwright, but also an amateur economist (see Chapter 7). In January 1935 Keynes wrote to Shaw:

To understand my state of mind, however, you have to know that I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize– not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years– the way the world thinks about economic problems.

Keynes’s forecast was remarkably accurate. His characterization of his project as “a book on economic theory,” however, was a slightly misleading. Despite the eventual publication title of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, he was– as many commentators have noted– very much writing a tract for the times.

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Type: Chapter
Information: The Clash of Economic Ideas
The Great Policy Debates and Experiments of the Last Hundred Years
, pp. 126 - 154

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511998218.006 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2012

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