Keynes's General Theory and Accumulation

9780521368155

0521368154

This book presents Keynes’s General Theory, and the attempts by Roy Harrod and Joan Robinson to extend that theory to the long period, in a careful, consistent manner. Keynes’s theory is of continuing importance for an understanding of current economic issues, but The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is a difficult book to read. In this book Professor Asimakopulos helps to make the material it contains accessible to students. Keynes’s theory deals with the factors determining the level of output and employment at a particular point in time, and he only briefly sketched out how the analysis can be extended to handle longer intervals of time. Harrod and Robinson developed formal analyses to deal with this question, and the analyses are clearly represented in this book. This presentation makes clear the limitations of any use of equilibrium concepts if Keynes’s concerns with the impossibility of knowing future conditions are made part of the analysis.