Talk:Keynes's theory of wages and prices

POV check

I added the {{POV check}} tag because I noticed a few judgemental phrases like "Chapters 20 and 21 are particularly difficult to read" and "Many aspects of his account present difficulties which it is best to consider at the outset", and I suspect there are others. -- Beland (talk) 18:21, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

@Beland: Thanks for your comments. I wouldn’t regard ‘judgemental phrases’ of that sort as a breach of neutrality: neutrality means presenting things in a way that neither pro- nor anti-Keynesians would reasonably object to. People tell me off for commenting on the relative clarity of parts of Keynes’s exposition, and occasionally delete my remarks. They say that I can’t call a sentence obscure but can quote someone else as calling it so. I don’t object when they delete my words, but feel that they slightly reduce the value of the text by doing so. Your second example is interesting. A Wikipedia author has to make decisions about how to present his material, and occasionally, if he doesn’t explain his decision, it may confuse the reader. But if his justification needs to be supported by references to reliable secondary sources, then he needs to find a secondary authority who has made the same decision and given the same reasons. Isn’t this putting gratuitous obstacles in the path of the author? Well I don’t feel strongly about this, and am willing to be overruled. Colin.champion (talk) 07:32, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

@Colin.champion: An opinion that a passage is unclear is still an opinion, and by my interpretation of neutral point of view, Wikipedia shouldn't have any opinions. Such passages also do not fit well into Wikipedia articles for reasons of tone and brevity, so rather than sourcing them I would simply omit them. They come across to me like a researcher complaining about the text they have to read, as opposed to an impersonal encyclopedic narrator. Whether Keynes writes clearly or opaquely is not really important; what is important is the content of his theories. Doing some more spot checkout, I see the article currently also wades into specific interpretational controversies with passages like "Schumpeter and Hicks appear to have taken Keynes's comment more literally than it was meant." which is a clear opinion on a controversial issue that Wikipedia should definitely not be expressing. This article would probably be shorter and of higher quality if it simply presented Keynes theory and any interpretational ambiguities or amendments by later scholars; the chapter by chapter approach is not generally used in Wikipedia articles about economic or scientific theories. -- Beland (talk) 21:04, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

@Beland: If it is ‘your interpretation’ of neutrality, then perhaps you won’t mind if I don’t share it. I didn’t intend to complain about Keynes’s obscurity, but without awareness of the difficulty of certain passages, a reader will not understand why interpretation is controversial, why any particular interpretation (including the one I have offered) is somewhat conjectural, and why it is useful to approach things in a certain way. I have no doubt that I have given an interpretation of Keynes, albeit a pretty orthodox one. It isn’t possible to do otherwise. He assumed fixed/variable prices, fixed or exogenous wages or made no assumption, attributed unemployment to hoarding/wage rigidity/failures in the demand mechanism or to something else, offered a static/dynamic deterministic/non-deterministic theory, adopted an implicit/explicit multiplier or both, distinguished government from private expenditure or didn’t, recommended inflation or didn’t, recommended deficit funding or didn’t, assumed a closed economy or didn’t, failed to an arguable extent to adapt his theory to the modified account of liquidity preference in Chapter 15 or made no such failure, may have regarded saving as being related to investment in any of at least 4 different ways, may have conducted his discussion of liquidity preference in wage or in money units, may or may not have considered the interest rate to adapt to supply and demand... According to Mark Hayes the General Theory is a Marshallian theory of equilibrium under perfect competition; according to Victoria Chick the Keynesian Revolution is one of methodology. There are infinitely many interpretations depending on which choice you make at any point. All anyone can do is to adopt a single interpretation and indicate the points of divergence from others. To hedge between them all is impossible, while adopting a single one may be said to ‘wade into an interpretational controversy’. Well, I don’t expect this to convince you... and for my part I am conscious of having said more than I think justified on certain topics, but I hesitate to pull back my words because, even while wishing I hadn’t written them, I think they are helpful to the reader. Colin.champion (talk) 09:28, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

@Colin.champion: Well, I think that interpretation of NPOV is shared by the majority of editors, but we can ask around if you like. It's fine to simply summarize what Keynes wrote if it's clear and undisputed; in cases where different economists read the text differently, Wikipedia has to describe each POV with due weight, and attribute that POV to someone. Publishing one's own interpretation of a book on Wikipedia might violate the policy against original research. I think it might help to discuss specific passages rather than generalities, though; I'll take a pass at editing the article. -- Beland (talk) 18:13, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

@Beland: One point where I agree with you (against some of what I wrote) is that if I’m forced to adopt a single interpretation, I should mention others as alternatives without any implication that they are less accurate. I don’t think I’m offering a new or individual interpretations of anything – generally what I say is very close to Hansen, Hayes and others, and on the whole represents the majority view of the most authoritative writers. (Chapters 20 and 21 may be an exception – nothing that Keynes wrote is clear and undisputed, and very little attention has been paid to these chapters by reliable authors. I think by your criteria nothing can be said about them, which would be unhelpful to readers.) I doubt the practicality of enumerating the published interpretations and giving them due weight: that replaces a book by a library. But I see you have been busy editing. I will take a look tomorrow. Colin.champion (talk) 21:11, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

@Beland: My first impression is that I have no complaint over any of your changes – if anything they’re quite conservative. There’s no need to hold back! Colin.champion (talk) 21:16, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

@Beland: I’ve looked a bit more closely. You’ve removed some rather editorial comments of my own which I had misgivings about, but there is a danger in standing so far back. Keynes – obviously – set out to present his views in the most favourable light, and academically respectable studies of the General Theory are exclusively written from a Keynesian viewpoint, yet most economists would not consider themselves Keynesians. If you follow the secondary consensus uncritically, you end up reporting the strong points and not the weak points of his theory, and providing an article which is unavoidably biased... or else ducking the issue by skipping over aspects which you can’t present critically and don’t want to present uncritically. Perhaps this is what you have done in condensing Keynes’s summary of the classical view of aggregate demand. I thought it noteworthy that the view he attributed to the classics in Chapter 19 is the exact opposite of the view he attributed to them elsewhere, and thought I could quote his words in one place as criticism of his words in another with no more danger of original research than if I quoted someone else’s words. But I admit that I have not seen the contradiction noted elsewhere. You have removed the whole passage leaving the reader, to my mind, with no real idea of what Keynes was saying. I don’t mind: I felt I was walking a tightrope and am happy to be relieved of the burden of getting it right. But you may end up with something which obeys all the rules while offering nothing to help the reader’s understanding. Colin.champion (talk) 09:19, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

@Beland: To be more precise, studies of Keynes are almost exclusively written from a Keynesian viewpoint. This book (which I haven’t read) is an exception. Colin.champion (talk) 10:29, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

If no published commentators have noted a contradiction, then it's unclear to me that there really is a contradiction (this is not a black-and-white case), or that it's important enough to put in an article that's supposed to be accessible to general-interest readers. If published commentators criticize this work as self-contradictory, that's worth mentioning, but Wikipedia doesn't offer up its own criticisms, both to maintain neutrality and to avoid a nearly infinite stream of unreliable material. -- Beland (talk) 17:46, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Removed text on Kahn

I dropped the section "Antecedents of Keynes's theory", because it gives no citation for the claim that the Kahn and Keynes theories are similar in any meaningful way. If such a source is found, it would be good if the text could be modified to explain what the similarities and differences are. The text below mostly just gives two quotes from the different authors without any explanation, and it requires a lot more background knowledge that I would expect of the reader to make heads or tails of that.

--- Keynes's theory bears a close (but unacknowledged) similarity to Kahn's account in his famous 1931 multiplier paper. Kahn had made "no claims of originality", suggesting that it was the "very obviousness" of his theory "which accounts for its being so persistently overlooked". He had written:

The price-level and output of home-produced consumption goods, just like the price and output of any single commodity, are determined by the conditions of supply and demand.

Keynes wrote:

In a single industry its particular price-level depends partly on the rate of remuneration of the factors of production which enter into its marginal cost, and partly on the scale of output. There is no reason to modify this conclusion when we pass to industry as a whole.

Kahn assumed constant money wages and never portrayed the supply curve as a demand curve.

References

Summary needed for article intro

Following WP:Summary style, the article needs an introduction that summarizes its contents. A paragraph or two summarizing Keynes' theory, with perhaps a key equation and some context about what the theory is used for and how it has been received. -- Beland (talk) 19:54, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Page numbers

A lot of parts of the article refer to page numbers, but it is unclear what book those numbers are found in. Wikipedia's general advice is to specify a specific version with an ISBN, because page numbers vary from edition to edition. -- Beland (talk) 19:57, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Chapter 20 derivation

In this edit I removed a long mathematical derivation which appears to be both non-neutral and original to Wikipedia, which is prohibited by Wikipedia:No original research. The derivation says it's making some assumptions Keynes did not make, and has some judgemental comments along the way when comparing what is happening here with Keynes' book. This article should be presenting a summary of Keynes' ideas or how other economists interpret Keynes. It's not OK to discard Keynes' terminology as "confusing" (which is non-neutral) unless there is a reliable published source which has a cleaned-up representation we can cite. There also needs to be a summary of these ideas in words, for readers who are not familiar with the mathematics, or who (usually including me) will just stop reading when they see equations. Which is something that might be already happening in other sections; I'm still digging through the very long article. -- Beland (talk) 23:18, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

@Beland: Fine by me. Colin.champion (talk) 07:45, 10 August 2019 (UTC)