Epstein Secrets

er, father of national accounts, originator of present value theory and human capital and next generation theory, and esteemed by both Adam Smith and Karl Marx for other innovations I don’t mention. Such men are understood slowly and incompletely. Forward By The Author 04/18/16 4 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_010916 C

vailable for business to borrow and invest. But business lacked the “animal spirits” to take such a risk ina slump. We saw the same story after 2008. Keynes’ proposal was for government to do the borrowing and investing instead. That’s part of the “fiscal policy” I described in Chapter 1. Here we tend to

saving is invested, as I use the word, but finds different returns. Saving under the mattress is investment at zero return, and drops output just as Keynes said. Investment at the current average return keeps output unchanged. That’s what Keynes meant. But investment at lower returns lowers output, and c

neage survival. We also need things. We should not fall into the trap of surplus value theory, which had been taught by communists for decades before Karl Marx joined their ranks, in supposing that skills make things. It is only half the truth. Skills plus things make skills plus things as the generations r

d their market value in return, as if on the books of a firm. Chapter 6: Parallels with the Firm 2/4/16 21 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011055 Marshall’s pupil Keynes was thoroughly a marginalist, as are economists in general today and as am I. One of the features of his General Theory of 1936 was a kind of double-

t the human capital of children. But Farr deserves credit for pointing out that human capital in general capitalizes pay less invested consumption. Keynes’ teacher Alfred Marshall agreed with Farr in 1990’. As I read this passage, Marshall interpreted maintenance consumption as investment. So did B. F.

of the instinct for competition, for constant new innovation, delivered the modern world you and | live in today. “All fixed, fast-frozen relations,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in 1849 about the speed of this change, “are swept away. All new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All

tire world was pulled into the fire. “In the autumn of 1919, in which I write, we are at the dead season of our fortunes,” the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote after the Paris Peace Conference settled The Great War, dimly aware that an even deader season lay somewhere in the future in the form of anoth