Robin Neill writes: 
> 
>     Savings = Investment.  They dont cause each other.  Something 
 
I'm not even willing to grant that equality unless we clarify whether 
we are talking "ex ante" or "ex post."  Of course they are equal ex 
post;  whatever is invested must have been saved.  The crucial question 
is whether they are always, sometimes, or never equal *ex ante* and 
under what conditions (and policies/regimes) those possible outcomes 
occur.  The ex ante/ex post distinction is central to what one might 
call "Wicksellian" macro (and before), and is more clear in Keynes in 
The Treatise than in The GT, where any acknowledgement of that 
distinction seems to have disappeared. 
 
The interesting questions for me are:  1) how and why do I and S diverge 
ex ante? and 2) what happens during the process of turning ex ante 
divergences into ex post equalities?  Both Keynes of the General Theory 
and IS-LM "Keynesianism" diverted us (in Leland Yeager's words) away 
from these important and interesting questions by defining I=S without 
making the ex ante/ex post distinction. 
 
Steve Horwitz 
St. Lawrence University 
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