I owe an answer ro James Ahiakpor's question why I did not translate the
text in French. I am guilty of cut and paste from the text provided by the
National Library of France. I assumed, however, that people in this list
are not offended by a few lines in beautiful French and that they would
prefer to read the great Galiani in the original than the traduttore
traditore Theocarakis' version thereof. Other contributors to the list
made much more profound comments that were not part of my intention when I
made the offending quotation. I thank them all. It is sadly true that
today translations are required. Gone are the days where F.Y. Edgeworth,
let alone Lord Acton, could quote in several languages assuming that their
readers would not mind. It seems also that even character sets are against
quotation from other languages. Accented vowels are being replaced by
obscure combinations of letters making foreign language quotations even more
intractable.
Anyway, Galiani in his _Dialogues on the Grain Trade_ pointed out that if it
would take fifteen days for the market mechanism to work out in order to
provide a town with grain, but the town had provisions for only a week, the
people of the town will have to go eight days without grain and that little
insect called man would starve. The theorem would hold, but the problem
would deteriorate. There is nothing Keynesian in this view, only that even
in the short run we might be dead.
Keynes was unfortunately not properly mirandized and I may not be a good
defence lawyer against such a determined prosecution. All I said, was that
it is wrong to attribute to the "in the long run we are all dead" statement
an indifference about what would happen to the future generations. James
thinks that he was a case of
La Cigale, ayant chant???
Tout l'???t???,
Se trouva fort d???pourvue
Quand la bise fut venue
*****
[Given the comment about accented vowels above, I decided to leave the text as originally written even though I am sure that many will see garbled characters. HB]
*****
James also misinterpretated what I wrote about his comments, perhaps because
my wording was unclear. When I wrote that "Equally, James Ahiakpor's
comment that
'increasing the rate of money creation may lower interest rates and
increase real output and employment in the short term' reflects his own
views", I meant James' views not Keynes'. What I said, was that Keynes had
an altogether different view about the determination of the level of the
interest rate. And in that, despite our profound disagreement about almost
everything else, I hope that we agree.
Nicholas J. Theocarakis
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