Keynes and Marx, Duncan and Me

1 Precursors of Keynes : Marx , Veblen , and Sismondi

Too often, the examination of the work of a major intellectual figure occurs in an historical vacuum. History has two meanings. One sense is obviously that of the social, political, and economic context within which a specific theoretical development takes place. Would Keynes have written The General Theory had England not suffered economic difficulties following World War I and had the capital...

Structural Contradictions of Current Capitalism: A Keynes-Marx-Schumpeter Analysis

9 Keynes and money

Introduction John Maynard Keynes was probably the most important and famous economist of the twentieth century. Keynes was primarily a specialist in monetary theory. The words money, monetary, currency appear in the title of all Keynes’s major books on economic theory. His conceptualization of money, however, differs significantly from that of classical economic theory, while the latter has dom...

Marx, Keynes, and Minsky on the Instability of the Capitalist Growth Process and the Nature of Government Economic Policy

In his essay in this volume, Hyman Minsky is hunting big game. As he tells us in his opening paragraph, he is attempting to explain the recurrent crises in the domestic economy and in the international financial system, as well as the failure of economic policy either to prevent the outbreak of these crises or to eliminate them in reasonably short order. He also presents a sharp critique of rec...

Keynes, Hayek and Complexity

In the spirit of the overall topic of the conference, in this paper I consider the extent to which economic theory includes elements of the complex systems approach. I am setting to one side here the developments over the past decade in applying complex systems analysis to economic problems. This is not because this recent work is not important. It most certainly is. But I want to argue that th...