[转载]当代英文散文三：Keynesism in the United States

Keynesism in the United States

By John Kenneth Galbraith

    At the close of 1933, Keynes addressed a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, which，not seeking reticence, he published in the New York Times. A single sentence summarized his case: “I lay overwhelming emphasis on the increase of national purchasing power resulting from governmental expenditure which is financed by loans….” The following year he visited FDR but the letter had been a better means of communication. Each man was puzzled by the face-to-face encounter. The President thought Keynes some kind of “a mathematician rather than a political economist.” Keynes was depressed; he had “supposed the President was more literate, economically speaking.”

    If corporations are large and strong, as they already were in the thirties, they can reduce their prices. And if unions are nonexistent or weak, as they were at the time in the United States, labor can then be forced to accept wage reductions. Action by one company will force action by another. The modern inflationary spiral will work in reverse; the reduced purchasing power of workers will add to its force. Through the National Recovery Administration Washington was trying to arrest  this process—a reasonable and even wise effort, given the circumstances. This Keynes and most economists did not see; he and they believed the NRA wrong, and ever since it has had a poor press. One of FDR’s foolish mistakes. Keynes wanted much more vigorous borrowing and spending; he thought the Administration far too cautious. And Washington was, indeed, reluctant.

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    The book was The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money. (For some reason Keynes omitted the commas.) he at least was not in doubt about its influence. Shortly before it was published in 1936, he told George Bernard Shaw that it would “largely revolutionise… the way the world thinks about economic problems.” So it did.

   The General Theory was published long before it was finished. It is deeply ambiguous and the ambiguity helped greatly to win converts. I’m not reaching for paradox.. When understanding is achieved after much effort, readers hold tenaciously to their belief. The pain, they wish to think, was worthwhile. and if there are enough contradictions and ambiguities, the reader can always find something he wants to believe. This too wins disciples.

    Keynes’s basic conclusion can, however, be put very directly. Previously it had been held that the economic system, any capitalist system, found its equilibrium at full employment. Left to itself, it was thus that is came to rest. Idle men and idle plant were an aberration, a wholly temporary failing. Keynes showed that the modern economy could as well find its equilibrium with continuing, serious unemployment. Its perfectly normal tendency was to what economists have since come to call an underemployment equilibrium.

    The ultimate cause of the underemployment equilibrium lay in the effort by individuals and firms to save more from income than it was currently profitable for businessmen to invest. What is saved from income must ultimately be spent or there will be a shortage of purchasing power. Previously for 150 years such a possibility had been excluded in the established economics. The income from producing goods was held always to be sufficient to buy the goods. Savings were always invested. Were there a surplus of savings, interest rates fell, and this ensured their use.

    Keynes did not deny that all savings got invested. But he showed that this could be accomplished by a fall in output (and employment) in the economy as a whole. Such a slump reduced earnings, changed business gains into losses, reduced personal incomes, and while it reduced investment, it reduced savings even more. It was in this way that savings were kept equal to investment. Adjustment, a benign word in economics, could be a chilling thing.

    From the foregoing came the remedy. The government should borrow and invest. If it borrowed and invested enough, all savings would be offset by investment at a high, not a low, level of output and employment. The General Theory validated the remedy that Keynes had previously urged. It would have been inconvenient if it had come out the other way.

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    Washington, as noted, was cool to Keynes. So, with The General Theory as his weapon, he captured the United States by way of the universities. His principal point of entry was Harvard. It was something I was fortunate enough to see at first hand. I was living as a young tutor at Winthrop House, one of the undergraduate residence units.

    Resident tutors had free rooms, free meals and as much money as they needed. We met each morning for a leisurely breakfast. It was a lovely and tranquil world; the only drawback was that things were so different just outside the university walls. Once in those Depression years I spent Christmas in Los Angeles. The streets were filled with desperate men who pled desperately for a little money; you could sense that they hated what they had to do but they had no choice. When you tried to pass them by, you saw the look of hopelessness and fright in their eyes. That was the contrast with our comfortable world.

    Keynes had a solution without revolution. Our pleasant world would remain; the unemploymnet and suffering would go. It seemed a miracle. In 1936, after the publication of The General Theory, there were meetings several times a week to discuss this wonderful thing.

    It was the young who were captured. Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas. It is still so. They make those they acquire as graduate students do for a lifetime. Change in economics comes only with the changing generations. The great economists of that day read and reviewed Keynes and uniformly found him wrong.

    But so influential was Keynes among the young at Harvard that in later years an association of alumni was formed to combat his influence. The threatened to cease financial support to the university unless his ideas were repressed or expunged, although it is not clear that many had given much before. Conservatives regularly extend their faith to the management of their personal resources. I was singled out for attack as the Crown Prince of “Keynesism.” I was greatly pleased and hoped that my friends would be properly resentful.

    That was Kyenes. You came to him out of conservatism, your desire for peaceful change. And by urging his ideas you won a reputation for being a radical.

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    From Harvard the ideas of Keynes went to Washington—by train. On Thursday and Friday nights in the New Deal years the Federal Express out of Boston to Washington would be half-filled with Harvard faculty members, old and young. All were on the way to impart wisdom to the New Deal. After The General Theory was published, the wisdom that the younger economists sought to impart was that of Keynes.

    It was thus that we learned of the Washington reluctance. To spend public money to create jobs might be necessary. But it was not something you urged out of choice. And to urge that a budget deficit was a good thing in itself—the heart of the Keynesian remedy—seemed insane. Men of sound judgment were repelled. Even one’ best friends, if in positions of responsibility, were cautious in the presence of such heresy. One does not overcome such caution by logic or eloquence but almost always the opposition comes to your rescue. It came galloping in those years.

    In 1937, recovery from the Great Depression was slowly under way; production and prices were rising, although unemployment was still appalling. The men of sound judgment now asserted themselves. They moved to cut spending, raise taxes and bring the federal budget into balance. The few Keynesians protested; our voices were drowned out in the roars of orthodox applause. As the budget moved toward balance, the recovery came to a halt. Presently there was a new and ghastly slump, a recession within the Depression. It was entirely as Keynes predicted. The men of sound judgment had made our case.

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    Where were our allies in Washington? they were, of all places, in the Federal Reserve System. we think of a central bank as a stronghold of myopic, unyielding conservatism. it is not an extravagant view but the Federal Reserve was then headed by Marriner Eccles, a Utah banker of highly original mind. Eccles had seen the lines of depositors form outside his own banks to get their money. He had seen men looking without hope for work. He knew the worried, broken farmers outside town. Why not have the government spend money to provide jobs and hope the farmers back to solvency? his experience had caused ideas very similar to those of Keynes to pass through his mind. Roosevelt had brought him to Washington.

   Eccles’s principal economic aide was Lauchlin Currie, a notable Canadian who had come south to rescue the the Republic. Previously he had been a faculty member at Harvard and had published a book on the supply and control of money that had anticipated some of the important propositions of Keynes. This caused him to be viewed with doubt by the great economists, and he was not promoted. In economics one should never be right too soon. The shrewd scholar always waits until the parade is passing his door and then steps bravely out in front of the band. Eccles and Currie became the leading exponents of Keynes in Washington.

    Scholars now speak of the Keynesian Revolution. Never before had a revolution captured a country by way of a bank. No one should worry that it will happen often again.

    From the Federal Reserve in the late thirties Currie went to the White House as an assistant to FDR. This was a strategic spot. When an economic post opened in the government or someone was needed for a special economic task, he would see, if possible, that someone with reliably Keynesian views was employed. several times he called on me. Conservatives always believed that there was a conspiracy to promote the Keynesian ideas. This everyone concerned indignantly denied. Much depends on the point of view. In later years Currie was accused of being a Communist. He was not. But for many people the difference between Keynes and Communism wasn’t too great.

    Also in the latter thirties, Keynes won his most important influential American recruit; that was Alvin Harvey Hansen, a professor first at Minnesota and then at Harvard and one of the most prestigious figures in the American economic pantheon. Hansen was no youngster whose views could be dismissed by the economic establishment. In books, articles and through his students he propagated the faith. Hansen and two other scholars—Seymour E. Harris, another diligent evangelist at Harvard, and Paul M. Samuelson, whose textbook, in face of sharp initial attack, instructed millions—made Keynes an accepted part of American economic thought.

    Although the recession of 1937 made Keynes’s ideas respectable in Washington, action to lift the level of employment remained half-hearted. In 1939, the year war came to Europe, nine and a half million Americans were unemployed. That was 17 percent of the labor force. Almost as many (14.6 percent) were still unemployed the following year.

    The war then brought the Keynesian remedy with a rush. Expenditures doubled and redoubled. So did the deficit. Before the end of 1942, unemployment was minimal. In many places labor was scarce.

There is another way of looking at this history. Hitler, having ended unemploymnet in Germany, had gone on to end it for his enemies. He was the true protagonist of the Keynesian ideas. （1950 words）

            --from The Age of Uncertainty