Applications and Adaptations of Keynesian ThOUGHT
Jim Sanderson
Fall 2006Applications and Adaptations of Keynesian ThOUGHT
Tim Gunderson
Applied Managerial Economics
Fall 2006
Introduction
John Maynard Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was perhaps the leading tenet of modern capitalist economic thought in the twenty-first century. Ubiquitous in modern Western economies, reviled by Marxists and the opponents of big government alike, Keynes' theories have become a main pillar of macroeconomics and as a result, Keynesian economics has had a profound effect on monetary policy in the Western world.
This paper provides a brief overview of how Keynesian thought and economics have affected policy and become fundamental tenets of macroeconomics. I will present the formative events and applications of Keynes's theories in chronological order, starting at the end of World War I and finishing at the present day. I will discuss how Keynes' theories have been adapted to include more and more microeconomic insights as well as some of the criticisms aimed at his work
The Treaty of Versailles
Keynes rise to prominence began when he was selected to be a delegate at the Paris Peace Conference of 1918-1919. Keynes thought that economic limits placed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty were far too severe and predicted the disastrous ramifications of the Versailles Treaty in his influential book The Economic Consequences of the Peace which predicted the rise of Nazism:
Men will not always die quietly. For starvation, which brings to some lethargy and a helpless despair, drives other temperaments to the nervous instability of hysteria and to a mad despair. And these in their distress may overturn the remnants of organization ...