Monetary Theory of Employment

Gardiner C. Means (1896-1988) was the co-author, with Adolf A. Berle, Jr., of The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932) and, with James C. Bonbright, of The Holding Company: Its Public Significance and Its Regulation (1932). Although an academic outsider, he worked for a number of federal government agencies, most notably the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Resources Committee; and for the Committee for Economic Development and the Fund for the Republic. He wrote or edited numerous other volumes. He emphasized administered pricing by corporations and the resultant tendency to inflation as both an accurate description of reality and a basis for policy. Warren J. Samuels is Professor of Economics at Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan. He specializes in the history of eco nomic thought, the economic role of government, and methodology. He is author of The Classical Theory o f Economic Policy and Pareto on Policy, a co-author of Gardiner C. Means: Institutionalist and Post Keynesian, co-editor of The Elgar Companion to Institutional and Evolutionary Economics and Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, and the author of numerous articles and book reviews. He has been president of the History of Economics Society and the Association for Social Economics. Frederic S. Lee is a Reader in Economics at DeMontfort University, Leicester, England. His areas of interest include Post Keynesian price theory, history of economics, and the Industrial Workers of the World. He is a co-editor of The Heterodox Economics of Gardiner C. Means and has written articles on Means that have appeared in the Review of Social Economy, the Journal of Economic Issues, and the Journal of Policy History. His other published articles have appeared in the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, the Review of Political Economy, and the History of Political Economy.

• Introduction: Means and the Making of an Anti-Keynesian Monetary Theory of Employment 1. Introduction Part I. Theories of Employment 2. The Saving-Investment Theory of Employment 3. A Challenge to the Saving-Investment Theory 4. The Classical Theory of Employment 5. The Marxian Theory of Employment Part II. An Insensitive-Price Theory of Economic Adjustment 6. Insensitive Prices and Wage Rates 7. Aggregate Demand and Insensitive Prices Part III. A Monetary Theory of Aggregate Demand 8. The Demand for Money 9. Assets and Economic Management 10. The Determinants of Aggregate Demand Part IV. A Monetary Theory of Employment 11. A Monetary Theory of Employment 12. The Necessity of Testing the Monetary Theory 1Part V. Problems of Corrective Action 13. The Problem of Maintaining Full Employment 14. The Problem of Achieving Full Employment 115. The Problem of Inflation 16. Dynamic Problems17. Certain International Implications of the Monetary Theory 18. Toward a Positive Program