------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW ------
Title: Keynes on the Wireless

Published by EH.NET (December 2011)

John Maynard Keynes, /Keynes on the Wireless/, edited by Donald Moggridge.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.  vi + 228 pp.  $40 (hardcover), ISBN:
978-0-230-23916-6.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Wade E. Shilts, Department of Economics and Business,
Luther College.

John Maynard Keynes described his /Essays in Persuasion/ as “the croakings
of a Cassandra who could never influence the course of events in time”
(1931 [1963], p. v).  He of course would be proved twice wrong.  We might
debate whether Keynes gets the economics correct, but his writings never
croaked and he certainly hasn’t been without influence.  Indeed, a better
title for that book, or for Keynes’ writings generally, might have been
/Essays That Have Been Really Persuasive (sometimes even when they
shouldn’t have been)/.

Now appears /Keynes on the Wireless/.  Edited by Donald Moggridge, author of
the important /Maynard Keynes: An Economist’s Biography/ (1992) and
co-editor with Elizabeth Johnson of the thirty volumes of /The Collected
Writings of John Maynard Keynes/ (1971-1989), /Keynes on the Wireless/
assembles the twenty-one radio broadcasts Keynes made, most on the BBC,
between 1925 and 1945. (Fifteen of these broadcasts were also published
contemporaneously in /The Listener/ and two in /The Nation and Athenaeum/.)

While the text of each of these broadcasts can be found in /The Collected
Writings/, they are spread across eleven separate volumes (xix, xi, xiii,
xviii-xxii, xxvi-xxviii).  Moggridge provides a one-stop destination for all
broadcasts.  He offers value to the economic historian grappling with the
narrative of inter-war finance, to the cultural historian exploring the
evolution of public intellectuals with the mass broadcast technologies, and
to the generalist digging into the what and when of Keynes’ economic ideas.

And for those who teach undergraduates, he provides a unique opportunity, a
dynamic way to illuminate the evolution of the ideas of one of the single
most influential economic thinkers of the twentieth century.

/Keynes on the Wireless/ shows Keynes at his articulate, thoughtful,
unrepentant, dangerous best.  Covering the period of his most fruitful work
in economics, the time during which he published both /The Treatise on Money/
(1930) and /The General Theory/ (1936), it shows Keynes translating his
theoretical ideas about finance, saving, and employment into terms that will
persuade a mass audience at the very time he is trying to work those ideas
out.

Except for a section on “Education and the Arts,” with three broadcasts
spanning the entire period, the broadcasts reproduced in /Keynes on the
Wireless/ appear according to the chronology of mid-twentieth century
finance:  first, two broadcasts on debts from World War I, then four on the
Depression and six on recovery, and finally six on World War II.

Not only do we see the evolution of Keynes’ own thought, we see him
engaging others.   Sixteen have the character of a public lecture.  The
remaining five show him in conversation with other thought leaders of the
day:  “University Men in Business” (1927) with then-managing director of
Lever Brothers, Ernest Walls, and chaired by Sir Ernest Benn;
“Unemployment” (1930) and “Spending and Saving” (1933) with Josiah
Stamp; “The World Economic Conference” (1933) with Walter Lippmann; and
“Should Saving Be Compulsory?” (1940) with Donald Tyerman, deputy editor
of /The Economist/.

In “Saving and Spending” (January 14, 1931, p. 57-66), we see the
broadcast that infuriated Friedrich Hayek just before the latter came to
England to give a set of lectures on “Prices and Production.”  Two years
later, in “Spending and Saving” (p. 96-110), we see Keynes rejecting
discussion with the “difficult and queer!” Lionel Robbins in favor of the
more simpatico Stamp (p. 96-97, quoting a letter of Keynes to Charles
Siepmann).  In “Is the Economic System Self-Adjusting?” (November 19,
1934), we see Keynes participating in a 12-part series on “poverty in
plenty,” and responding to H.D. Henderson, R.H. Brand, Robbins, Hugh
Dalton, J.A. Hobson, A.R. Orage, and Barbara Wootton (p. 131-141).

Moggridge, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Toronto, has
over four decades of experience as a Keynes scholar.  It shows.  As editor,
he stays out of the way and lets Keynes do the speaking.  Both introduction
and the lead-ins to individual broadcasts are brief and succinct, providing
bits of context without surrendering to the temptation to summarize what is
to come.

/Keynes on the Wireless/ does not resolve ever-ongoing debates about
Keynesian demand management.  It does, however, throw those debates into
sharp relief.  These broadcasts provide the kind of primary source material
we who would teach the economic past to 18-22 year-olds need more of.   The
book could be a supplemental text in a wide range of courses in public
finance, economic history, and the history of thought.

And if you’re teaching principles of macroeconomics and seeking to improve
the economic thinking skills of tomorrow’s citizens?  Toss out half of
that overpriced textbook you’re using and replace it with /Keynes on the
Wireless/, either alone or in dialogue with some essays from Friedman or
Hayek.  And then exercise the economic thinking muscles of tomorrow’s
citizens in a way that neither the /New York Times/ nor the /Wall Street
Journal/, much less the talking head panels of Fox, CNN, and PBS, do.

References:

Keynes, John Maynard. 1930.  /The Treatise on Money/.  In /The Collected
Writings/, volumes 5-6.

Keynes, John Maynard. 1931.  /Essays on Persuasion/. New York: W. W. Norton,
1963 reprint.

Keynes Papers, King’s College, Cambridge. 1932.  File BR/2, Letter from
Keynes to Siepmann, 10 November 1932.

Keynes, John Maynard. 1936.  /The General Theory of Employment, Interest and
Money/.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Keynes, John Maynard. 1971-1989.  /The Collected Writings of John Maynard
Keynes/.  London: Macmillan, 1971-1989.  Edited by Elizabeth Johnson and
Donald E. Moggridge.

Moggridge, Donald E.  1992.  /Maynard Keynes: An Economist’s Biography/.
London and New York: Routledge.

Wade E. Shilts ([log in to unmask]) is associate professor of economics at
Luther College.  His research focuses upon the economics of listening.  His
current work-in-progress, /Barriers of Faith: Scalability, Listening and the
Real Challenges Facing Higher Education in an Anarchic World/, focuses on the
challenges of teaching “economics for citizenship” to undergraduates.

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Geographic Location: Europe
Subject: Financial Markets, Financial Institutions, and Monetary History,
Government, Law and Regulation, Public Finance, History of Economic Thought;
Methodology
Time: 20th Century: Pre WWII