Central themes of Paul Davidson's John Maynard Keynes

Abstract

Paul Davidson's admirable and concise new introduction to Keynes the person and to the ideas of Keynes emphasizes Keynes's demonstration that even a competitive economy with freely flexible wages and prices may lack an adjustment mechanism to automatically restore full employment without active government stabilization policy. This paper underlines Davidson's critique of the neutral money axiom of neoclassicals economics by showing that money cannot be both neutral and superneutral, uses student notes on Keynes's lectures to extend Davidson's account of how IS-LM came to be accepted as a representation of Keynes, and questions Davidson's claim that the existence of equilibrium in neoclassical economics depends on assuming that all goods are gross substitutes.

Keywords:

• Paul Davidson
• gross substitutes
• John Maynard Keynes
• neutral money