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Keynes'
work was very varied and he wrote on any issues of the day he felt
important. He was particularly critical of the amount of money demanded
from Germany for war reparations after World War I and this prompted
him to write a pamphlet.
The
Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)
In
1919, Keynes had presented in The Economic Consequences of the Peace,
a lugubrious view of the future of 19th century capitalism. The
system was in jeopardy; population was increasing at a rapid rate
in the West, with the result that Europe had to pay much more dearly
for its food and raw material.
Keynes
at this time was especially impressed by the threat to savings and
maldistribution of pre-war days. Not being fearful of excessive
savings at all times and under all conditions, he in 1919, devoted
much space to the fearful effects of galloping inflation on savings
in war-torn Europe. It had made possible the accumulation and economic
progress of the 19th century.
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Keynes' vision revealed the embryo of his maturity theory. It remained only to conceptualize this vision in his theory. A few years after the publication of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes defended his position against criticism by Beveridge, admitting that the terms of trade had temporarily turned in favor of Britain, but also maintained that the decline in the volume of British exports itself was a symptom of excessive population.
Keynes' main contribution, which established him as an economist, was to raise and dispose of the issue of the transfer problem. |
A
Treatise on Probability (1921)
In
1920, Keynes began to prepare his Treatise on Probability for publication,
the work that he completed in 1911. However it was published in
1921, and was considered the most important of his work as far as
mathematical archive was concerned. In this work, he argued that
classical theory of probability had a logical relation and so it
was objective. A statement involving probability relations had a
truth-value, independent of people's opinions. Keynes' work caused
something of a stir, arousing the young Cantabrigian Logician, Franck
P Ramsey, who is 1926, published a paper Truth and Probability arguing
against Keynes.
Other
important ideas discussed by Keynes in Treatise on Probability is
that probability relations form only a partially ordered set in
the sense that two probabilities could not necessarily always be
compared. Keynes also argued that probability was a basic concept,
which could not be reduced to other concepts.
Keynes
made a fortune speculating in international currencies and wrote
Treatise on Probability, a work that demonstrated unusual capacity
in the rarified atmosphere of mathematical logic.
With
the worldwide slump, post 1929 period, Keynes set himself to the
task of explaining and of coming up with new methods to control
trade-cycles. As a result two book were produced : A Treatise on
Money and The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
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