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 [log in to unmask]