Understanding Economic Equilibrium

CHAPTER 5

Consumers and Consumption: Follow the Money

Great Britain’s John Maynard Keynes was one of the most influential economists of all time—his most influential work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1935. A macroeconomist, he developed theories shaped by the major global events of the time, in particular the Great Depression, the rumblings leading up to World War II, then the war itself and the postwar period of exponential global productivity growth. In a 1930 essay titled, The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Keynes, reflecting on the nature of the twentieth century’s macroeconomic productivity surge, predicted that by the twenty-first century the average developed country workweek would ...