once economic decisions are pictured as being made sequentially, as in real life, ownership patterns turn out to evolve through time in highly specific ways?— and they systematically gravitate toward precisely the kinds of patterns that generate indeterminacy of factor prices. As a result, the central problem with marginal productivity theory that John Hicks recognized […]

[Keynes’] fundamental innovation was the theory of effective demand: the idea that employment is set by total spending, so that the market system has no automatic tendency to settle on full employment. Keynes himself was keen to stress that the General Theory was radical only on that particular point, and that once the state intervened […]

All markets must be perfectly competitive (whereas most of ours are not); if such a world existed, the requirement of perfect competition would rule out any division of labor or long-run economic growth. There must be an infinite number of futures markets?— one for every good in existence, delivered at every future date, for the […]