On 11/18/2013 4:47 PM, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> It's incredible to me that someone writing on the History of Economic Thought list wants "evidence" that Keynes considered saving not to be spending
> by income earners but a withdrawal from the expenditure stream!  Incredible also because every introductory macroeconomics students learns that
> meaning of saving.  Anyhow, Robert can look up Keynes's meaning of saving in the _Treatise_ (1930), volume 1, p. 172, the _General Theory_ (1936), pp.
> 74 and 210; Keynes's _Economic Journal_ articles (December 1937) and (June 1938).  (Joan Robinson, _EJ_, 1938 repeats Keynes's definition of saving to
> mean a withdrawal from the expenditure stream.)  Robert can also check these pieces of evidence, in contrast with the classical explanation that
> savings are spent by borrowers, that is, saving is not cash hoarding (Smith, Ricardo, and J.S. Mill) in chapter 2 of _Keynes and the Classics
> Reconsidered_ (Kluwer, 1998), a volume to which he contributed a chapter (7).


Quoting from the GT, ch 7 (of course):
"The prevalence of the idea that saving and investment, taken in their straightforward sense, can differ from one another, is to be explained, I 
think, by an optical illusion due to regarding an individual depositor’s relation to his bank as being a one-sided transaction, instead of seeing it 
as the two-sided transaction which it actually is. It is supposed that a depositor and his bank can somehow contrive between them to perform an 
operation by which savings can disappear into the banking system so that they are lost to investment, or, contrariwise, that the banking system can 
make it possible for investment to occur, to which no saving corresponds. But no one can save without acquiring an asset, whether it be cash or a debt 
or capital-goods; and no one can acquire an asset which he did not previously possess, unless either an asset of equal value is newly produced or 
someone else parts with an asset of that value which he previously had. In the first alternative there is a corresponding new investment: in the 
second alternative someone else must be dis-saving an equal sum. For his loss of wealth must be due to his consumption exceeding his income, and not 
to a loss on capital account through a change in the value of a capital-asset, since it is not a case of his suffering a loss of value which his asset 
formerly had; he is duly receiving the current value of his asset and yet is not retaining this value in wealth of any form, i.e. he must be spending 
it on current consumption in excess of current income. Moreover, if it is the banking system which parts with an asset, someone must be parting with 
cash. It follows that the aggregate saving of the first individual and of others taken together must necessarily be equal to the amount of current new 
investment."

Alan Isaac