================= HES POSTING ================= 
 
Greg Ransom asks: 
 
>Nobel Prize winning economist John Hicks writes: 
> 
>"The shift in attention, in the work of Keynes, is well known; from 
>the _Treatise_ of 1930, which in essence was a theory of prices, or price- 
>levels, to the _General Theory_ of 1936, which was a theory of employment. 
>It is not well known that it is matched by a movement from Hayek to 
>Harrod.  I once asked Harrod what had put him on to the construction of 
>his so-called 'dynamic' theory; he said, to my surprise, that it was 
>thinking about Hayek."  (John Hicks, "Are There Economic Cycles?", In 
>_Money, Interest and Wages_, pp. 340-341.  Cambridge:  Harvard U. Press) 
> 
>Can anyone supply me the context for Hicks' remarks on Harrod and Hayek? 
 
        At a later stage in his career, Harrod claimed that his first 
writing in dynamics (according to his own definition of dynamics, which 
stressed the search for a mode of growth characterised by the mutual 
consistency of growth in the various components of the economic system) was 
an article written in 1934 to rebuke the argument, put forward by Hayek, 
that an injection of money into the economic system would cause 
disproportions and eventually alter the relative prices and cause a 
depression ("The Expansion of Credit in an Advancing Community", Economics 
NS1, August 1934, pp. 287-299. The reference to Hayek is not explicit 
there, but Harrod refers to him in the opening footnote he added to the 
reprint in his 1952 "Economic Essays"). 
        It must be pointed out, however, (1) that this first attempt 
fundamentally differs from Harrod's later (from 1936 onwards) approach in 
that the economic advance was taken as exogenously given, while later it 
was the endogenous result of the interaction of the multiplier and the 
accelerator. (2) At that stage, and in spite of his later claim, Harrod was 
more concerned with the Hayekians than with Hayek. Harrod, in fact, was 
engaged at that time in debates with people like Evan Durbin and Hugh 
Gaitskell on economic policy, and several references in his article and 
correspondence point in that direction. 
 
Daniele Besomi 
c.p. 59 
6950 Tesserete 
Switzerland 
Tel. & fax: +41 91 9433635 
e-mail: [log in to unmask] 
 
============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ 
For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask] 
 
 
============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ 
For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]