Đang chuẩn bị liên kết để tải về tài liệu:
History of Economic Analysis part 119

History of Economic Analysis part 119. At the time of his death in 1950, Joseph Schumpeter-one of the major figures in economics during the first half of the 20th century-was working on his monumental History of Economic Analysis. A complete history of humankind's theoretical efforts to understand economic phenomena from ancient Greece to the present, this book is an important contribution to the history of ideas as well as to economics. | History of economic analysis 1142 hypothesis perhaps permissible in the very short run that it is uniquely determined by national income. The latter s current value is by definition identically equal to current consumption plus current investment all three quantities being expressed in wage-units.9 And with all the givens implied current value of national income may be said to be determined by three functions or schedules that Keynes dignified with the title of psychological laws 10 the consumption function the investment function and the liquidity-preference function the three great simplifiers which are to implement Keynes s vision of the economic process in particular the intention to prove the existence of underemployment equilibria and to put it with perhaps inadmissible emphasis his conviction that saving or alternatively the rate of interest holds the role of villain of the piece that impoverishes nations.11 In a sense similar to that in which the Marshallian demand curve descends from Cournot and objectively also from Verri the Keynesian consumption function descends from Malthus and Wicksell12 but received added pre- assuming the quantity of means of payment to be externally given i.e. of being freely malleable by governments and central banks. This assumption brings us all protests notwithstanding dangerously near to a crude quantity theory of which an externally given quantity of money is as we have seen an outstanding feature. It would be un bearably unrealistic even for modern England unless as Arthur Smithies has pointed out we define the quantity to mean legal tender outside of banks plus the maximum of deposits the law and the authorities permit banks to create. 9 Since savings are defined as the difference between income and consumption this identity yields the familiar identity between current savings and current rate of investment. But for the latter identity to be valid current investment must not in turn be identified as has been done by Keynes