Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- General Introduction
- Editorial Foreword
- Preface
- Introduction to New Edition
- Notes on Further Reading
- Corrections to this Edition
- I THE TREATY OF PEACE
- II INFLATION AND DEFLATION
- 1 INFLATION (1919)
- 2 SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF CHANGES IN THE VALUE OF MONEY (1923)
- 3 THE FRENCH FRANC (1926, 1928)
- 4 CAN LLOYD GEORGE DO IT? (1929)
- 5 THE GREAT SLUMP OF 1930 (DECEMBER 1930)
- 6 ECONOMY (1931)
- 7 THE CONSEQUENCES TO THE BANKS OF THE COLLAPSE OF MONEY VALUES (AUGUST 1931)
- III THE RETURN TO THE GOLD STANDARD
- IV POLITICS
- V THE FUTURE
- VI LATER ESSAYS
- Index
6 - ECONOMY (1931)
from II - INFLATION AND DEFLATION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- General Introduction
- Editorial Foreword
- Preface
- Introduction to New Edition
- Notes on Further Reading
- Corrections to this Edition
- I THE TREATY OF PEACE
- II INFLATION AND DEFLATION
- 1 INFLATION (1919)
- 2 SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF CHANGES IN THE VALUE OF MONEY (1923)
- 3 THE FRENCH FRANC (1926, 1928)
- 4 CAN LLOYD GEORGE DO IT? (1929)
- 5 THE GREAT SLUMP OF 1930 (DECEMBER 1930)
- 6 ECONOMY (1931)
- 7 THE CONSEQUENCES TO THE BANKS OF THE COLLAPSE OF MONEY VALUES (AUGUST 1931)
- III THE RETURN TO THE GOLD STANDARD
- IV POLITICS
- V THE FUTURE
- VI LATER ESSAYS
- Index
Summary
SAVING AND SPENDING (January 1931)
Written as a radio talk for a British Broadcasting Corporation series on unemployment and published in the Listener, 14 January 1931, with the title, ‘The Problem of Unemployment—II’. (Keynes's talk was the second in the series.)
The slump in trade and employment and the business losses which are being incurred are as bad as the worst which have ever occurred in the modern history of the world. No country is exempt. The privation and—what is sometimes worse—the anxiety which exist today in millions of homes all over the world is extreme. In the three chief industrial countries of the world, Great Britain, Germany and the United States, I estimate that probably 12 million industrial workers stand idle. But I am not sure that there is not even more human misery today in the great agricultural countries of the world—Canada, Australia, and South America, where millions of small farmers see themselves ruined by the fall in the prices of their products, so that their receipts after harvest bring them in much less than the crops have cost them to produce. For the fall in the prices of the great staple products of the world such as wheat, wool, sugar, cotton, and indeed most other commodities has been simply catastrophic. Most of these prices are now below their pre-war level; yet costs, as we all know, remain far above their pre-war level.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes , pp. 135 - 149Publisher: Royal Economic SocietyPrint publication year: 1978