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“John Stuart Mill’s profound insight that demand for commodities is not demand for labour, which Leslie Stephen could in 1878 still describe as the doctrine whose ‘complete apprehension is, perhaps, the best test of a sound economist’, remained for Keynes an incomprehensible absurdity.” (Collected Works, Vol. 9. p. 249) What to Hayek was a “profound insight”, what to Leslie Stephen was “the best test of a sound economist” was to Keynes “an incomprehensible absurdity”. And so it remains today, not just to Keynesians but to virtually the entire profession most of whom could not be made to understand this under almost any imaginable conditions. In the straightforward words of today, what Mill wrote was this: “Buying things does not create jobs”. He wrote this before there had been a single stimulus package anywhere in the world. He wrote it because of the pure logic of how economies work. And the logic it was based upon was the logic of Say’s Law. But now we have seen stimulus programs. We have seen the New Deal, the stagflation of the 1970s, the failure of the stimulus in Japan in the 1990s and now all - 9 - of the many similar failures around the world. We have actually seen that buying things does not create jobs, but unlike during classical times, we no longer have an economic theory to explain the outcomes that are occurring right before our eyes. For a discussion of this proposition of Mill’s (as well as many other matters relating to Say’s Law), see my Say’s Law and the Keynesian Revolution (1998: 71-73). Let me therefore quote myself from this work on these very issues, also written well before our present failing public spending programs: “Stimulating demand will do the unemployed no good. Raising consumption may, in fact, lower the ability to employ rather than increase it, if it consumes capital that might otherwise have been diverted into payments to labour. The cure for unemployment does not occur through actions taken on the demand side, but through actions which raise production.” (Kates 1998: 73) Is there one economist in a thousand who any longer understands this? The Keynesian Revolution has been astonishingly destructive of the ability for economists to understand how an economy works. Mill did not, of course, know Keynes but he knew many “Keynesians”. Mill wrote that amongst the economists of his own time most at times spoke as if buying goods was identical to hiring labour. “[They] occasionally express themselves as if a person who buys commodities, the produce of labour, was an employer of labour, and created a demand for it as really, and in the same sense as if he bought the labour itself directly, by the payment of wages.” (Mill [1848] 1924: 80) And of such economists Mill was in despair: “It is no wonder that political economy advances slowly, when such a question as this still remains open at its very threshold.” Not only did economics fail to advance slowly or otherwise, with the arrival of Keynesian economics it retreated back into its Stone Age. Think of this. Because of Keynes, it is probable that economists today understand the operation of our economies less well than did the economics profession of a hundred and fifty years ago. If that does not cause you to despair, I cannot imagine what would. - 10 - 墨尔本代写Bibliography Kates, Steven. 1998. Say’s Law and the Keynesian Revolution: how macroeconomic theory lost its way. Edward Elgar: Cheltenham. |
