Ric, when you say that: 
 
> If a nation does have a high savings rate then certain benefits are 
>shifted to future generations. 
 
are you speaking of the neoclasical view?  The first thing that pops to 
mind is the famous first few pages of chapter 16 of the _General Theory_: 
 
"An act of individual saving means- so to speak- a decision not to have 
dinner today.  But it does _not_ necessitate a decision to have dinner or 
to buy a pair of boots a week hence or a year hence or to consume any 
specified thing at any specified date.  Thus it depresses the business of 
preparing to-day's dinner without stimulating the business of making ready 
for some future act of consumption.  It is not a substitution of future 
consumption-demand for present consumption-demand, -it is a net dimunition 
of such demand.  Moreover, the expectation of future consumption is so 
largely based on present consumption that a reduction in the latter is 
likely to depress the former, with the result that the act of saving...may 
reduce present invstment-demand as well as present consumption-demand...In 
any case...an individual decision to save does not, in actual fact, involve 
the placing of any specific forward order for consumption, but merely the 
cancellation of a present order." (1964[1936]: 210-11). 
 
There's more good stuff there, with words like 'absurd', 'specious' and 
'fallacy' used to describe the idea that "current investment is promoted by 
individual saving to the same extent as present consumption is diminished", 
but my fingertips are starting to hurt. 
 
By the way, since this passage is squarely in Book IV, we may have to 
reconsider using the respective lengths of Books III and IV in determining 
the relative importance of consumption and investment for Keynes. :) 
 
I agree that investment is the independent variable, it's "where the action 
is" in Keynes, and Keynes's ideas on investment and money and uncertainty 
of expectations have been ignored and diluted and misrepresented and 
misunderstood in the mainstream and textbook presentations, but consumption 
is still important for Keynes's theory.  Keynes's consumption theory plays 
a role in the principle of effective demand, the multiplier concept, his 
critique of the neoclassical theory of savings, etc.  Stability of 
consumption patterns (as opposed to volatility and unreliability of 
investment) should not be taken to mean unimportant.  Isn't consumption 
theory integral to the notion that investment determines savings through 
changes in the level of income, as opposed to savings determining 
investment through variations in the rate of interest? 
 
___________________________________ 
 
Mathew Forstater      Department of Economics 
        Gettysburg College     Gettysburg, PA  17325 
 
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