If 1979 had been a year of transcendental success because Khorana had finally succeeded in creating a synthetic gene that could function within a cell, it followed a year that had brought him great personal sorrow. His younger daughter, Emily Anne, succumbed to leukemia on July 12, 1978, after a protracted illness. She was 23 years old and her mortal remains were interred at Henniker Cemetery in Henniker, New Hampshire, where the Khoranas had bought a cabin.

The family was devastated, though they knew Emily's death was coming. Friends mourned with them across the world. In Liverpool, Gobind's old mentor, Roger Beer found it sadly ironic that Khorana, who had done so much to reveal the secrets of life, had been helpless when cancer attacked his young daughter. He could well have asked: What was the point of all this biological research?

Emily's death dominated 1978, but was not the only tragedy that year. On June 26, 1978, George Kenner, who had had a history of depression, died by suicide. After teaching at Cambridge for a number of years, he had moved to the University of Liverpool in 1957, where he became Heath Harrison Professor of Organic Chemistry and, after 1976, Royal Society Professor. When the Khoranas visited Beer at Liverpool over the years, they had also kept up with George and his wife, Jill. While Kenner had had a superb research career studying protein synthesis, eventually he succumbed to his depression and took his own life in a remote area in the hills of Wales where he loved to hike.

Following Kenner's death, the University of Liverpool Department of Chemistry instituted the George Kenner Prize and Lectures. The first of these lectures was held on October 28, 1980. Todd introduced the lecturer who, appropriately, was Khorana, speaking on the final complete synthesis of a functional gene (“Synthesis in the study of biological function of nucleic acids”). Todd also presented Khorana with an engraved bowl designed by Denis Mann of Caithness Glass, a well-known glass artist (see Figure 8.1). Khorana stayed with the Beers as usual. It must have been a bittersweet reunion: Kenner had been a friend to all of them.

Introduction

Contemporary Kenya, like all the states of Africa save for Ethiopia and the island states, is a product of colonial imperialism. The landmark development in the formal colonization of Africa was the holding of the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 when the continent was formally sliced up and shared by seven colonial powers as discussed in Chapter 1. Kenya was claimed by the British who officially declared it a British Protectorate in 1895 under the name “East African Protectorate.” Uganda had been declared a British Protectorate in 1894. To open the hinterland and connect it to the bustling Port of Mombasa, the British commenced the construction of a railway linking Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast with Kisumu (then known as Port Florence) on Lake Victoria. Construction of the railway began in 1896 and was completed in 1901, spanning 965 kilometers. Although construction of this so-called Uganda Railway proceeded briskly, it was seriously interrupted and halted between March and August 1898 in the Taru Desert of Tsavo in present-day Taita Taveta County by two marauding lions nicknamed “Man Eaters of Tsavo” that terrorized Indian and African railway workers, killing 135 of them before they were finally killed by Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson after a nine-month period of horror among railway workers (Patterson 1985).

In 1902 the border between Kenya and Uganda was defined, making Kisumu and the area around Lake Victoria part of Kenya. In 1907, the British colonial administration moved from Mombasa to Nairobi. Three years later, in 1910, Nairobi became the official capital of Kenya, having been founded in 1899 as a railway depot. From 1895 to 1906, the protectorate was administered by a commissioner. Thereafter, the title changed to Governor, with Sir James Sadler as the first governor, having been preceded by three commissioners including Arthur Hardinge, Charles Eliot, and Donald Stewart (see Table 2.1). The country remained the East African Protectorate until July 1920 when it was declared the Crown Colony of Kenya. Among the most critical issues that defined the development of Kenya within this colonial context include the White settler demands, the Indian question, the land and labor issue, and the rise of anticolonial nationalism. This chapter explores these issues with a view to evaluating their impact in the making of contemporary Kenya.

During the last few days much has been said and written about “long-period” and “short-period” theories of “effective demand”. While the original purpose of this paper was to try to clarify, from a Keynesian perspective, what may be meant by the term effective demand, it is obvious that the terms long- and short-period also bear definition. I shall thus commence with a digression on what I shall intend by these terms.

1 DIGRESSION ON LONG- AND SHORT-PERIOD

Marshall is only apparently the source of the problem. Yet, Marshall did not have a short- and a long-period theory of value and distribution (perhaps it would be more correct to say “price”). There is one, and only one, theory of price in Marshall. He did, however, use the market period, the short period and the long period to separate out the analysis of all the various aspects of the relevant forces operating to determine prices. The major operative force was substitution-instigated competition or as Knight was to summarize it, the “law” of one price. The market period concentrates on the operation of competitive forces on prices alone; substitution is only possible among final outputs. In the short period an additional aspect, substitution of existing productive capacity is added. Finally, in the long period substitution operates on all inputs and outputs. The full operation of these forces was thought to produce the tendency towards full employ¬ment of all inputs and the sale of all outputs.

In the same way, the Classical economists had only one theory of value and distribu¬tion. It emphasized the fundamental forces of competition which lead entrepreneurs to invest in those sectors yielding the highest rates of profit; what is now summarised by the “tendency to a uniform rate of profit”. The operation of these forces was analyzed by separating market values from natural values and both from the stationary state. In the case of market values, chance factors could completely offset the fundamental forces; while in the stationary state their work had been brought to the limit set by population growth and technical progress.

Kalecki was always quite clear that he considered his theory to apply to long periods only when viewed as a series of short-period situations. The distinction of Kalecki's approach is that it uses price determination to produce an explanation of the level of output.

Introduction

Through legislative institutions and procedures, Danish society formally pursues policies to repatriate refugees from Denmark (Vitus and Jarlby, 2021). The state wants them to return to their country of origin. Countries fled due to the fear for their lives. Concretely, Danish political parties and coalitions, in recent years right-wing coalitions supported by public opinion against refugees, have introduced policies for repatriation targeting refugees. Additional policies also facilitate programs in which former refugees, who currently might hold residence permits or even Danish citizenship, could also qualify for repatriation if they voluntarily wish to return home. Diverse bureaucratic structures, as well as civic groups and NGOs advocating for refugee rights, play an intermediate role in the process, complicating the implementation of such restrictive policies. The bureaucracy specifies and implements policies, while civic groups and NGOs criticize or directly fight against such policies. Certain civic groups also mobilize and empower refugee-migrant communities in resisting policies, thereby overcoming the immediate and expected long-term challenges of some of the particularly ratified policies.

However, although the stated legal and political dimensions of repatriation policies remain central, how the targeted communities respond formally and informally to such processes also influences the eventual outcome. In particular, the dilemma communities confront includes their prevailing ambivalent connections to both host and homeland environments. Most community members want to periodically return and connect to their homelands, but obviously on their own terms. At the same time, many of them did not aim to abandon Denmark. Therefore, for most of them, it is not a question of either or nor, as many have invested in belonging to both societies and thereby establishing roots and ties. Among the scholars studying such uncertainties, Kibreab describes transnational ambivalence as follows:

KEYNES's CHALLENGE TO MONETARY AUTHORITIES IN 1930: INTRODUCE ZIRP AND QE

At the end of 1930, as the US stock market crash was starting to have a negative impact on the real economy in the form of falling commodity prices, falling output, and ris¬ing unemployment, John Maynard Keynes, in the concluding chapters of his Treatise on Money, launched a challenge to monetary authorities: take ‘deliberate and vigorous action’ to reduce interest rates and reverse the crisis. He argued that until ‘extraordi¬nary’, ‘unorthodox’ monetary policy action ‘has been taken along such lines as these and has failed, need we, in the light of the argument of this treatise, admit that the banking system can not, on this occasion, control the rate of investment, and, therefore, the level of prices’ (Keynes 1930a: 387). The ‘unorthodox’ policies that Keynes rec¬ommends are virtually identical to the Japanese central bank's experiment with zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) in the 1990s and the US Federal Reserve's experiment with ZIRP, accompanied by quantitative easing (QE1 and QE2), during the recent crisis. While too late to be considered a response to Keynes's challenge, these modern policy measures provide a clear test of Keynes's belief in the power of monetary policy to coun¬ter financial crisis. This modern response to Keynes's challenge would appear to be a clear admission of the inability of monetary policy to influence the rate of investment as a means of responding to the crisis. Indeed, Keynes himself seems to have modified his position as his thinking evolved towards the analysis of the General Theory.

THE OBJECTIVES OF MONETARY POLICY

In the penultimate chapter of volume 2 of the Treatise, Keynes raises ‘the crux of the whole matter’ of monetary policy: ‘[D]oes it lie within the power of a central bank in actual practice to pursue a policy which will have the effect of fixing the value of money at any prescribed level?’ (Keynes 1930a : 339).

Despite some residual doubts, Keynes nonetheless answers his own question in the affirmative, urging central bankers to adopt ‘extraordinary’, ‘unorthodox’ measures to reduce interest rates to near zero in an attempt to counter the deepening recession.

Keynes's major contribution to economic theory is often characterised as an emphasis on the possible difference between ex-ante decisions and ex-post results or on the recogni¬tion that, in an uncertain world, expectations may be disappointed. On such an appre¬ciation of Keynes's contribution to economic theory numerous writers have, reasonably, questioned the frequently avowed Keynesian parentage of what has come to be called post-Keynesian (or Cambridge) economic theory. Professor Lachmann maintains that the practitioners of the “Cambridge School” are “ill-equipped to deal with autonomous changes in demand or in the range of divergence of expectations, to which Keynes attributed importance and drew our attention, and on which the pattern of specifying investment decisions depends”, and that the approach thus lacks essential factors associ¬ated with Keynes's work. Professor Lachmann further maintains that this deficiency is especially visible in the complete reliance of the Cambridge school on static macro equilibrium; a concept that he believes to be non-existent in, and certainly inconsistent with, any economic theory claiming Keynes as parent.

Professor Blaug has recently echoed this particular theme, asserting that post-Keynesian theory has “been no more successful than the orthodox theory in throwing off the straitjacket of equilibrium analysis in conditions of perfect certainty and full information”.

Such arguments lead to two conclusions. First, that the post-Keynesian generalisa¬tion of the General Theory is a sham and neglects the most important aspects of Keynes's work, especially through reliance on steady-state equilibrium models; and secondly, that the use of such an equilibrium approach makes the theory a poor substitute for, if not identical with, the orthodox theory of static equilibrium (cf. Blaug, op. cit., pp. 83–6).

It is the purpose of what follows to show the dubious nature of such conclusions and to demonstrate both how post-Keynesian theory can be seen as a legitimate extension of the basic methodology employed by Keynes in the General Theory and that the nature and use of the concept of equilibrium in post-Keynesian theory is unmistakably dif¬ferent from the orthodox nature and use of the concept. The implicit conclusion is, of course, that most critics have seriously misinterpreted Keynes's methodological position in the General Theory.

The Nobel Prize brought Khorana fame, but it also brought even higher expectations. Though he may not have minded the fanfare, psychologically, all the attention took its toll. A short time after returning to Madison from Stockholm, he suddenly disappeared from his laboratory apparently in a state of mental exhaustion, possibly depression. For several months he was unavailable. Laboratory members tracked him to Vancouver, where he was recuperating, but showed little interest in an immediate return. Friends said that he sat by the water for hours every day staring into the distance. But, soon, a crisis emerged within the laboratory as a dispute burst open between two factions that refused to work together. RajBhandary duly reported the problem to Khorana and it finally had the effect of making him return to establish peace. The laboratory could start functioning again.

Laboratory members also recall that wherever Khorana went—and he gave many seminars in the late 1960s—he was repeatedly asked whether he had finished synthesizing a gene. Was it done yet? When would it be done? He must have felt immense pressure though, after that initial retreat to Vancouver, it would not manifest itself publicly.

He had brought the pressure on himself. In the early 1960s, when not even the sequence of a single gene was known, he had announced his goal of the total synthesis of a functional gene. He was always explicit that the drive to decipher the genetic code was a mere detour from that pursuit even though it had brought him fame and a share of a Nobel Prize. Synthesizing the gene was a much more challenging—and, therefore, intellectually satisfying—problem:

Introduction

The fight for political independence in Kenya was waged on many fronts—the cultural, the social, the political, the economic, and the military—and by multiple social forces—individual and corporate, ethnic, and religious, as well as regional and trans-regional. Nevertheless, in spite of the multiple identity groups involved in the struggle for independence, they all found common ground in anticolonial nationalism and harnessed unity that mirrored the dictum; “we either hang together or are hanged separately.” The urgent sense of purpose on the part of these anticolonial nationalists was almost contagious. Yet, within the first decade of independence, the sense of unity and collective purpose irreparably atrophied, and, by the end of the decade, it had virtually died. More than six decades since independence, Kenya is much less of a nation than it was in 1963. The erstwhile objective of “nation-building” has largely been betrayed. This chapter sets out to probe, explore, and analyze this betrayal of anticolonial nationalism in Kenya, and evaluate its consequences for the future of the country. The chapter proceeds by focusing on the paradoxes inherent in the relationship between two political families—the Odingas and the Kenyattas—whose political dynamics have, to a large extent, defined what ought to have been and what actually is in the Kenyan body politic.

Kenyatta and Odinga: The Making of Two Nationalist Leaders

The Kenyattas and the Odingas are formidable political families that have had and continue to have a significant imprint on the politics of Kenya. Within the politics of decolonization, the patriarchs of these two families, Jomo Kenyatta and Oginga Odinga respectively, found common ground in their anticolonial nationalism within the ambit of the Kenya African National Union (KANU). The partnership between the two saw Kenyatta become the first president of independent Kenya and Oginga Odinga the first vice president. Yet this partnership did not last long on account of ideological differences between the two and their opposite visions of what independence ought to have signified. The two leaders fell out with each other within the first two years of Kenya's independence in a manner whose implications were profound for the new republic.

On August 15, 1947, India gained independence from the British who left it almost bankrupt after centuries of colonial plunder, most recently to finance its war against Germany and the Axis powers. The following spring, Khorana completed his Ph.D. at the University of Liverpool. The terms of his scholarship, because it had been funded by the Government of India, required him to return to India. But Khorana did not want to return, at least not immediately. He wanted a year's postdoctoral stay in Europe. Ostensibly, this wish was motivated by a desire to learn German well enough to navigate effortlessly the vast German scientific literature on organic chemistry. He later claimed: “I wanted very much to spend a period of time in a laboratory in a German-speaking region of Europe.”

In the chaos in continental Europe that followed World War II, laboratories in Germany or Austria were not viable options. That only left Switzerland as a possible destination in German-speaking regions. It is probably not a coincidence that this was where Esther lived. In fact, there is ample reason to believe that learning German alone does not explain Khorana's preference for Switzerland over India in 1948. It was mostly an excuse or, at best, a rationalization.

The Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zürich

As his intended destination, Khorana chose the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zürich which, as he later correctly noted, had “had a great tradition in organic chemistry.” He then applied for a year's funding from the new Government of India but, given its dire financial straits, he was not surprised when the application was turned down. However, according to him:

1 RATIONAL AND NON-RATIONAL THEORIES OF ECONOMIC BEHAVIOUR

According to Dornbusch and Fisher (and the editors who requested a survey of ‘non-rational (sic) theories of the formation of expectations related to the microfoundations of macroeconomics’) the post Keynesian ‘rejection of individual rationality and maxi¬mization as a basis of behaviour by firms and households has kept the approach at odds with the mainstream of the profession that has been attempting to bring macroeconom¬ics into closer touch with microeconomics’ (1984, p. 571). This interpretation of post Keynesian theory as rejecting the assumption of rational agents, the homo economicus of Classical theory, appears to be based on two factors. First, and probably the most per¬vasive, is the pre-eminent role given to ‘animal spirits’ in the determination of the level of investment. The second is the rejection of any possibility of bringing Keynes’ the¬ory into ‘closer touch’ with traditional microeconomics, reflecting Hicks’ view that the investigations of the microfoundations of macroeconomics have demonstrated that it is the former which is the branch of theory most in need of foundations. Post Keynesian theory thus proposes the macrofoundations of microeconomics, and the development of a theory of the behaviour of money prices based on liquidity preference. The two points are related by the fact that Keynes’ explanation of the ‘rational’ response to uncertainty is the use of money as a store of value, the price of money being determined by the effect of uncertainty on liquidity preference and the decisions to hold positions in all other goods then determining their prices so as to bring their rates of return into equality with the money rate of interest.

The idea of a macrofoundation for microeconomics within post Keynesian theory in fact predates the modern microfoundations discussion and can be found in the work of Kalecki on the degree of monopoly, Andrews on full-cost pricing, Weintraub on the stability of the mark-up and, more in general, the use of these approaches to provide a microfoundation for the macroeconomic models of economic growth linked to the names of Robinson, Kaldor and Pasinetti. As this brief essay cannot cover the entire range of work in this area we simply note the representative work of Marris, Eichner, Wood, and Earl and concentrate on a simplified presentation of the relation between uncertainty, money and Keynes’ theory of value.

Introduction

As demonstrated in Chapter 3, Kenya emerged into independence in 1963 with a quasi-federalist multiparty political system with a two-chamber parliament at the national level. The system was rooted in a rigid constitution intended to ensure its entrenched provisions endured. By the end of the decade of the 1960s, however, multiparty politics was no more, the two Houses of parliament had been merged, the regional governments had been abolished, and the so-called radicals had been marginalized from the center of power. This calculated process of power consolidation saw political power centralized in the presidency resulting in bureaucratic authoritarianism overseen by an imperial presidency under Jomo Kenyatta (Chepkwony 1987; Nyong’o 1989). In achieving this, founding president Jomo Kenyatta was supported and encouraged by the United States, through the latter's first ambassador to Kenya, William Attwood.

In encouraging and supporting Kenyatta to marginalize the so-called radicals from the center of power, the United States was advancing its own interests in terms of fighting Communism. The likes of Oginga Odinga, Bildad Kaggia, and Joseph Murumbi, among others, were considered by the United States as socialist individuals who provided an opening wedge for the entry of Communism into Kenya. In a context in which the Cold War was heightening, the United States committed to steering Kenya away from the Eastern camp of the Soviet Union by all means. In doing so, the United States ended up abetting the establishment of authoritarianism in Kenya under the guise of fighting Communism. This chapter examines the role of the United States in helping Jomo Kenyatta fight the “Communist” elements in Kenya, consolidate his power, and thus inaugurate an authoritarian political dispensation in the country. It focuses on U.S. diplomatic practice in Kenya during the tenure of William Attwood, the first American ambassador to Kenya. The chapter then juxtaposes Attwood's diplomacy with that of Smith Hempstone who arrived in Kenya at the end of the Cold War, to illustrate the changing nature of American diplomacy toward Kenya even when its objective remained the same—advancing the American national self-interest.

Competitive Markets: Failure or Inexistence? The Early Critics

A telling comment on the current state of confusion in economics is offered by the decision of the Swedish Academy to award this year's Nobel Prize to Ronald Coase, only a year after awarding the Prize jointly to Harry Markowitz, Merton Miller and William Sharpe for their analysis of financial markets based on the principle of perfectly competitive efficient markets. Amongst the many interpretations of Coase's ideas is one which says that the “auctioneer” of Walrasian theory cannot remain exogenous to the analysis of price formation. Real, live market makers, whether they be auctioneers or dealers, expect to be remunerated for their time and effort and to earn the market rate of return on capital employed. These are what are now referred to as “transactions” costs, and they lead to all sorts of anomalies when introduced into efficient, perfect market theories.

In perfectly competitive conditions, if the costs of maintaining the auctioneer exceed the benefits of exchange, then competitive equilibrium may not be reached by the free market; in competitive conditions new entrants should bring down transactions costs or new transactions technologies or organisational forms should be introduced in order to reduce transactions costs. As Coase suggests, one competing form of organisation is to internalise transactions within a central coordinating mechanism to replace the auctioneer and which is commonly called a firm. It is interesting that traditional theory has been no more prolific in analysing the firm than it has in analysing the life and habitat of the auctioneer.

If the excessive costs of using the market lead to replacing it with an internal organisation called the “firm”, this will reduce market transactions and further increase trans¬actions costs associated with the market, creating a vicious cycle in which eventually no transactions take place via the market. The introduction of the traditional competitive process into the analysis of the provision of the transactions services of the market leads to the paradox that without intermediaries markets cannot function, but when interme¬diaries are too costly, the market may not exist.

In notes prepared for his 1937 lectures Keynes observes that he “reached the conception of effective demand comparatively late on” (1973b, p. 180) and indicates a period after 1932. This would seem to preclude any direct link between Kahn's formulation of the multiplier, worked out in 1930 and published in 1931, and what Keynes called effective demand. Indeed, Keynes distinguished between his “initial novelty” concerning the introduction of the multiplier as the mechanism equilibrating savings and investment which was “independent of my subsequent theory of the rate of interest” and which he formulated “before I had reached the latter theory” of the rate of interest. The analysis of output adjustment to equate savings and investment in terms of the aggregate sup¬ply and demand framework left an important monetary variable, the rate of interest, undetermined: “If the rate of interest is not determined by saving and investment in the same way in which price is determined by supply and demand, how is it determined? One naturally began by supposing that the rate of interest must be determined in some sense by productivity — that it was, perhaps, simply the monetary equivalent of the marginal efficiency of capital, the latter being independently fixed by physical and tech¬nical considerations in conjunction with the expected demand. It was only when this line of approach led repeatedly to what seemed to be circular reasoning, that I hit on what I now think to be the true explanation” (1973b, p. 212), and Keynes goes on to define the function of the rate of interest as “to modify the money prices of other capital assets in such a way as to equalise the attraction of holding them and of holding cash” (ibid., p. 213). An attentive reader of the Treatise would here recognise the determination of investment goods’ prices by means of bearishness and the decisions of the banking system to create money transformed into a supply and demand analysis analogous to that for output. The analysis differed, however, in that it now determined the “price” of money, the rate of interest rather than the price of investment goods, and it reversed the Treatise order of causation, making the marginal efficiency of capital depend on the money rate of interest, rather than the natural rate being the determinant of investment.

In the early 1970s, even as the functional tyrosine suppressor tRNA gene was being synthesized in his laboratory, Khorana began seriously considering moving on from DNA. He was not alone among prominent researchers in molecular biology—we must remember that he did not call himself a molecular biologist—looking for research pastures beyond DNA, areas in which it was likely that there still was low-hung fruit to gather. Crick moved on to study consciousness. Nirenberg also moved on to neurobiology, to the study of neuroblastomas (tumors in the nervous system), a field to which he eventually made important contributions.

Khorana was also attracted by the prospect of a molecular neurobiology. That he chose to focus on membrane proteins seems to have been partly due to the influence of Efraim Racker, an Austrian-born biochemist, whose laboratory he visited at Cornell University in 1973. He set up a collaboration with Racker, which began with rather modest expectations. As he explained later:

That Khorana should turn his attention to membranes in the context of the early 1970s is not very surprising. They were becoming fashionable for a variety of reasons.

Most importantly, membranes surrounded all living cells. They seemed to be the locus of many physiological activities including energy production. Protein molecules within them were implicated in signal transduction.

Joan Robinson used the aphorism “[t]ime is a device to keep everything from happen¬ing at once” to distinguish history from an economy in equilibrium with complete mar¬kets for all states, times and places and allows all decisions about the future to be taken in the present. In such conditions there can be no default, since its occurrence would evidence a market failure. Alan Greenspan supported financial innovation to provide more complete markets and more efficient distribution of risk. However, in reality the complete markets were provided by AIG's Financial Products unit. The rest is history.

Explanations of the crisis blame the unexpected appearance of Black Swans with fat tails in one hundred year floods. This is recognition of the difficulties in reducing history to moments of a probability distribution. Economists have not been ignorant of these difficulties. Knight distinguished between risk and uncertainty, Shackle high¬lighted crucial experiments, Davidson emphasizes the distinction between non-ergodic and ergodic processes, and Benoit Mandelbrot has pictured known fractal chaotic pro¬cesses that are unpredictable. All suggest that statistical estimates of unknown future events cannot be predicted by past events. Recently, David Hendry has noted that time series data cannot provide the basis for forecasts of the future of the economy, which renders the dynamic general equilibrium model logically inconsistent. Sample statistics are not good estimates of population parameters when the population changes over time. This attempt to use statistical methods to incorporate history has failed. Modern economics thus restricts itself to an unchanging environment in which agents are capa¬ble of acquiring full knowledge of system evolution to form “rational” expectations. This is the approach that grounded value at risk (VAR) and the risk assessment of every insolvent structured derivative entity. The rest is history.

Is economics condemned by Santayana's curse to repeat its equilibrium past? There is a call for a “new economic paradigm,” but recollection of Keynes's theory and evolu¬tionary economists might better serve this purpose.

In stating that “the whole problem of monetary theory is largely one of deducing changes in anticipations from the changes in objective data that draw them forth,” Hicks (1935, 13) was concerned with the problem of how individuals transformed objec¬tive data into expectations, viz. his “elasticity of expectations.”

Alternate Interpretations of Keynes's Theory

Foreign language experts are well aware of words and expressions in every language that defy precise translation. Yet the necessity of communication requires efforts, even if imperfect, to make such translations. The problem is very similar to the idea of the “Gestalt” shift used by Kuhn (1962) to explain differences in theoretical paradigms. Essential components of one theory may not even find expression in another. But such difficulty has not stopped efforts to translate one theoretical perspective into another.

Keynes believed that his 1936 General Theory represented a radically new method of economic analysis. He intimated to G. B. Shaw in a letter dated 1 January 1935, “I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolu¬tionize … the way the world thinks about economic problems.” His inclination was to accentuate his divergence from existing theory. But he was counseled to maximize communication with “orthodox” economists by preserving as much as possible of the existing “language.”

Harrod warned Keynes, “What I fear is that readers may not understand; and that the dust you want to raise will obscure the view of your central points. If the economists who read your book don't take the essential points, the outlook is bad. There is a limit to what the human mind can assimilate” (Keynes XIII, pp. 555–56). “I am thinking of the effectiveness of your work. Its effectiveness is diminished if you try to eradicate very deep-rooted habits of thought unnecessarily. One of these is the supply and demand analysis … don't impugn that analysis itself” (Keynes XIII, pp. 533–34).

Despite Keynes's belief that his task was to work out “A Monetary Theory of Production” (Ibid., p. 408ff) “in which changing views about the future are capable of influencing the quantity of employment and not merely its direction” (Keynes VIII, p. xxii), economists quickly set to work to try to translate the new theory into more familiar language to compare its “generality” relative to the traditional (Keynes called it “classical”) theory. Keynes's theory thus came to be represented as the aggregation of specific groupings or “bundles” of traditional micro supply and demand equations into “market” relations for money, bonds, and goods to determine the level of real national income.