American Keynesianism by Jewish Talmudics in the 1930s

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

And to think of people wasting their lives screaming about the Jewish version of  "Keynesianism" implemented in America... all the Jews who have SCAMMED the USA in this generation blame "Keynesianism" but is Keynes truly to blame? Or is it the Jews who implemented a Talmudic vision for their own "Chosen Tribe" running Government programs under his Gentile name? I think the latter... and all the Idiots at ZeroHedge.com will scream forever about "Big Government" and "Keynes is to blame" without ever realizing the ugly Talmudic Jew SCAMS underneath it all... Keynesianism has been "Jewish" from the get-go and without Keynes... --CSR

[There] are a few other references to Jews in Keynes's writings which would now be construed as anti-Talmudic. In A Short View of Russia he had doubted whether communism "makes Jews less avaricious". After a visit to Berlin in June 1926, he depicted Germany as under the "ugly thumbs" of its "impure Jews", who had "sublimated immortality into compound interest".  :shock:  This was for a talk to The Memoir Club, published only posthumously;

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The Coming of Keynesianism to America.

The subtitle to this delightful, interesting book tells the editors' approach: "Conversations with the Founders of Keynesian Economics Keynesian Economics

An economic theory stating that active government intervention in the marketplace and monetary policy is the best method of ensuring economic growth and stability. ." And that is what it is, a series of reminiscences of twelve persons who began their professional careers in the 1930s. Preceding the conversations is a well-crafted Introduction which could serve as a synopsis for the book's "findings." But to read that alone would do an injustice to the book because so much of the enjoyment is reading the ruminations of those who were present at the (American) creation.

About half are native to the United States United States, officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. : Paul M. Sweezy, the Marxist, of Harvard, who was a student at the LSE LSE - Language Sensitive Editor  in 1932;  Alvin Harvey Hansen (1887-1975), often referred to as "the American Keynes", brought the 1930s Keynesian economics revolution to the United States. A professor of economics at Harvard, he was a prolific writer who also played an important role in the creation of the Council of  of the frequently cited Fiscal Policy Seminar he conducted jointly with John H. Williams Movie producer and CEO of Vanguard Animation studio.

 at the then newly founded Littauer School; Walter S. Salant of Harvard, who as a student at Cambridge in 1933-34 listened to Keynes's lectures; Paul Samuelson; and Leon H. Keyserling, a lawyer and New Dealer who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in 1946-49.

There are three Canadians: Robert Bryce Robert Broughton Bryce, PC, CC, B.A.Sc, FRSC (February 27, 1910 – July 30, 1997) was a Canadian civil servant.

Bryce started working for the Department of Finance in 1938, later becoming assistant deputy minister of Finance and Secretary to the Treasury Board. , Lorie Tarshis (of the first American First American may refer to:

 Principles book with a Keynesian macroeconomics macroeconomics

Study of the entire economy in terms of the total amount of goods and services produced, total income earned, level of employment of productive resources, and general behaviour of prices.  section, about which much time is spent on it and the subsequent Samuelson text), each of whom spent several pre-General Theory years attending Keynes's Cambridge lectures, and J. K. Galbraith, who in the absence from Cambridge of Keynes due to a heart attack spent 1937-38 discussing the General Theory with Kahn, Joan Robinson Joan Violet Robinson (October 31, 1903 in Surrey - August 5, 1983 in Cambridge) was a Marxist Keynesian economist who was well known for her knowledge of monetary economics and wide-ranging contributions to economic theory. , Kalecki, and Sraffa. Bryce and Tarshis were also members of the fabled Keynes Club. "[D]etermined to be a missionary for Keynesian ideas," Bryce delivered to Hayek's seminar at the LSE the first systematic presentation of the General Theory's ideas. He went to Harvard for a few years beginning in 1935 and was with Sweezy the organizer of an informal seminar on Keynes, one in which several of the economists here participated.

Another who recounts his impressions is Abba Lerner, a student and later faculty member at the LSE for whom Keynes wrote to Robbins praising Lerner's "acute and subtle mind" but discouraging an appointment, suggesting instead that Lerner "take up . . . a craft" during the day and pursue economics in his "Talmudist" ways in the evening [pp. 113-15]. Lerner spent half a year at Cambridge, coming to understand the General Theory while listening to Keynes lecturing from its galley proofs.

Evsey Domar Evsey David Domar (April 16, 1914 - April 1, 1997) was a Polish-American economist, famous as co-author of the Harrod-Domar model. Life
Evsey Domar was born on April 16, 1914 in the Polish city of Łódź, which belonged to Russia at that time.  and Richard Musgrave's link to Keynes was through attendance at Hansen's Seminar and their subsequent positions at the Board of Governors in the early 1940s, particularly to the Board seminar Keynes delivered in 1943 in which he dismissed Lerner's functional finance, with Lerner in attendance, an occasion vividly recalled in five remembrances. Finally, there is Tibor de Scitovsky also known as Tibor Scitovsky, (1910- June 1 2002) was an American economist who was best known for his writing on the nature of people's happiness in relation to consumption. , who after leaving Budapest went to Cambridge where he had no interaction with Keynes. After receiving a master's from the LSE, he spent some time at Harvard where he "discussed plenty of economics but very little about Keynes" [p. 210].

In assimilating and digesting Keynes in America, nothing is heard of any place other than Cambridge, really Harvard, and Washington. Stanford shows up after the War because Scitovsky and Tarshis were there. Prior to the War, it was Hansen's Fiscal Policy Seminar that was the beacon, as attested by Samuelson, Salant, Galbraith to an extent, Domar, and the editors. Hansen takes no explicit credit for his role.

Another point to note is that the Keynesianism of that time considered price movements as a cost plus markup (text) markup - In computerised document preparation, a method of adding information to the text indicating the logical components of a document, or instructions for layout of the text on the page or other information which can be interpreted by some automatic system.  phenomenon, a tradition carried over to the large scale econometric models of forty years later. Excess demand was not a consideration.

Though several comment on the state of the profession in trying to understand the depression, Samuelson in the book's longest chapter, says it best when he points out that explanations of its causes varied - Smoot-Hawley, confluence of cycles - but there nonetheless "was a lot of dissatisfaction, even among orthodox economists, with the simple notion" [p. 147] of letting the price level fall enough to reestablish equilibrium.

The basis for postwar plans to deal with the almost universally expected depression was the War's demonstration that Keynesian economics worked. Of all the economists of whom those included here were aware, there were only two who disagreed with the postwar depression expectation [p. 130]. Interestingly, Keynes did not believe that there would be a postwar depression because Social Security would reduce private saving, thereby generating additional aggregate demand [p. 202]. Keynes's preoccupation with too much saving is another theme. Questions of the national debt held no interest for Keynes. Lastly, several comment on his rude treatment of Lerner's functional finance. Keynes praised it in a letter to Lerner a year later [pp. 116-17].

This is a delightful, insightful book for scholars interested in the history of the Keynesian Revolution. It also is a good read. There is surprisingly little disagreement among the lively conversationalists on the main propositions concerning the development of Keynesianism in America. An additional plus is the index.

Frank G. Steindl Oklahoma State University Oklahoma State University, at Stillwater; land-grant and state supported; coeducational; chartered 1890, opened 1891 as Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College, renamed 1957.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Comin ... a018604561

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Professional career

After his doctorate, Hansen taught at Brown University until his appointment at the University of Minnesota in 1923. His major works were in the neoclassical economics tradition.

In 1937 Hansen was appointed Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. He was the first of a generation of economists there attracted to Keynes's economic theory. Hansen's seminar on fiscal policy inspired graduate students such as Paul Samuelson and James Tobin who would further develop and popularize Keynesian economics. Hansen's 1941 book, Fiscal Policy and Business Cycles, was the first major work in the United States to entirely support Keynes's analysis of the causes of the Great Depression. Hansen used that analysis to argue for Keynesian deficit spending.
IS-LM model, displaying interest rates (i) on the y-axis and national income or production (Y) on the x-axis.

Hansen's best known contribution to economics was his and John Hicks' development of the IS-LM model, also known as the Hicks-Hansen synthesis. The framework graphically represents investment-savings (IS) and the liquidity-money supply (LM), and can be used to illustrate how fiscal and monetary policies can be employed to alter national income.

Hansen's 1938 book Full Recovery or Stagnation was based on a small portion of John Maynard Keynes's The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, and was an extended argument that there would be long-term employment stagnation without government demand-side intervention. Ultimately, economic stagnation theories became more associated with Hansen than with Keynes.

Hansen frequently testified before Congress. He advocated against using unemployment to controll inflation. He thought that price inflation could be managed by timely changes in tax rates and money supply (Functional finance), and by effective wage and price controls. He also advocated fiscal and other stimulus to ward off the stagnation that he thought was endemic to mature industrialized economies.

During the Roosevelt and Truman presidencies Hansen was influential in shaping policy. He served on government commissions and as consultant to the Federal Reserve Board, the United States Department of the Treasury and the National Resources Planning Board. In 1935, he helped create the U.S. social security system and, in 1946, he assisted in the drafting of the Full Employment Act which, among other things, created the Council of Economic Advisors. Between 1939 and 1945 he served as co-rapporteur to the economic and financial group of the Council on Foreign Relations' War and Peace Studies project, along with Chicago economist Jacob Viner.[1]

Hansen's advocacy (with Luther Gulick) during World War II of Keynesian policies to promote post-war full employment helped persuade Keynes to help develop plans for the international economy that emphasized free trade.[2]

Hansen's 1953 book, A Guide to Keynes, (like Paul Samuelson's Economics) promoted Keynesian economics in the United States and in many other countries after World War II.

Hansen also served as Vice President of the American Statistical Association and President of the American Economic Association.

He died June 6, 1975 in Alexandria, Virginia.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Hansen

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Apparently some J-Tribers see Keynes as "Anti-Semitic"-- i.e., someone calling the Jews out on their collective SCAMS...

Keynesian Historiography and the Anti-Semitism Question
E. Roy Weintraub

"By anti-Semitism‟, I understand, first,
beliefs about Jews or Jewish projects that
are both false and hostile, and secondly,
the injurious things said to or about Jews
or their projects, or done to them, in
consequence of those beliefs."
(Julius 2010, 65)


Historians' treatment of John Maynard Keynes's putative anti-Semitism raises complex historiographic issues. These differ from such questions as whether Carl Jung's or Paul de Man's standing as charismatic intellectual leaders of communities engaged in new ways of thinking and acting was associated in some way with their anti-Semitic writings2. In contrast, as the charismatic intellectual leader of the ―Keynesians, Keynes has never3 been characterized as having created a system of thought that was anti-Semitic. Nevertheless the publication of Melvin W. Reder's (2000) paper, ―The Anti-Semitism of some Eminent Economists‖ opened up a related question, namely whether the term ―ambivalent anti-Semitism could be applied variously to John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, and Friedrich Hayek. That is, Reder argued that those three important economists expressed themselves in ways that today would be characterized as anti-Semitic. Although in their personal dealings each of these individuals had apparent positive regard for individual Jewish colleagues, and even friends (e.g. Keynes and Kahn), their utterances are characterized by what Reder called anti-Semitic stereotyping at least, and political anti-Semitic argumentation at worst. Reder used the neologism ―ambivalent anti-Semitism to characterize Keynes's views.

I am not concerned here to appraise Reder's argument about whether the label ―anti-Semitic, whether ―ambivalent‖ or not, is usefully attached to Keynes. I rather am concerned with the issue of how Keynesian historiography has dealt with the anti-Semitism question. That is, I am concerned with the role that Keynes's attitudes and remarks about individual Jews, and ―the Jews, has played out in Keynesian scholarship, and how the community of Keynes scholars has treated the allegation that Keynes was anti-Semitic.

Recognizing the Keynes Anti-Semitism Problem

To introduce the concerns of this paper, consider an exchange of letters between Robert Skidelsky, Keynes's biographer then at work on Volume Two (Skidelsky 1992) of the eventual three volume work, and the economist Don Patinkin, who also had written extensively on Keynes's General Theory. In a letter to Skidelsky dated 22 July 19874, Patinkin raised the following point:

There is an observation that came to my mind when I reread his (Keynes') 'Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren' . . . which reminded me of a similar—though less explicit—sentence in Volume 1 of the Treatise [on Money] (page 11) about 'the Semitic race is etc.' These references probably reflect the genteel anti-Semitism of the British upper middleclass. But his hitherto unpublished essay on Albert Einstein is a disgusting piece of coarse anti-Semitism of the street. (I once told Donald Moggridge that he should not have published it; but Moggridge said [that] Keynes could have destroyed it, but left it in his papers—so he meant it to be published. Maybe Moggridge was right.) . . . I think that this is a subject that you must also treat in your biography, and I hope that you will overcome any inhibitions that you might have on that score. In Volume 1 you made it very clear that in order to understand Keynes, one must also discuss his homosexualism [sic]. I think the same is true for his anti-Semitism.

Patinkin appears to have worried about this matter, and after a few years he wrote again to Skidelsky (May 4, 1992)5, pointing to Keynes's sentence ?'Perhaps it is not an accident that the race which did most to bring the promise of immortality into the heart and essence of our religions has also done most for the principle of compound interest and particularly loves this most purposive of human institutions (JMK, IX, 330))'. That, to me, is an anti-Semitic remark.?
As noted, Patinkin was upset by Keynes's remarks on Einstein penned for the New Statesmen and Nation, 21 October 1933, which piece referred to Einstein as a ?Jew boy? and which went on to say ?Yet Albert and the blond beast make up the world between them. If either cast the other out, life is diminished in its force. When the barbarians destroyed the ancient race as witches . . .?

Skidelsky replied to Patinkin on 5 June 1994:

I would have thought that Keynes is simply saying that the world needs both the impersonal intellect and the community spirit, though the way he identifies these things with the Jews and the Nazis respectively, was part of the atmosphere of the early 1930s. Nowadays we would obviously see Nazism as a perversion of community feeling, not as its somewhat unbridled expression, but this was very early days.

On June 20, 1994 Patinkin replied
if your interpretation of Keynes's New Statesmen article is correct, then it is really scandalous for by October 1933, the dictatorial and violently anti-Semitic nature of the Nazi regime was evident for all to see. After all, why had Einstein left Germany for England? Was that an expression of 'community spirit'? So I think this article is even worse than Keynes's morally insensitive preface to the German edition of the General Theory.
Skidelsky's reply9 on 11 July, 1994 was that

I have little doubt that Keynes shared the anti-Semitic attitude of his upper middleclass English milieu as well as that turn-of-the-century (and later!) Cambridge. . . but what should we do with the kind of expressions `Jew boy . . . [who] has had his bottom many times kicked, and expects it' and similar ones in his unpublished piece on Einstein (JMK12, pages 382-84)? That's anti-Semitism of the gutter. On the other hand, there were his close relations with Richard Kahn and the warmth of his two concluding paragraphs in his essay on Melchior. . . . I certainly have no thought of starting a 'was Keynes anti-Semitic' debate.
Skidelsky (2003) readdressed these matters when he revised his three volume work to produce a one volume abridged version of the biography. In many ways a stronger narrative emerged as the later materials could be woven into the earlier chapters. In that new volume, Skidelsky addressed the anti-Semitism issue via examination of Keynes's essay ?Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren? which essay had contained Keynes's remark about Jews and the principle of compound interest. Skidelsky wrote:
[There] are a few other references to Jews in Keynes's writings which would now be construed as anti-semitic. In A Short View of Russia he had doubted whether communism 'makes Jews less avaricious'. After a visit to Berlin in June 1926, he depicted Germany as under the 'ugly thumbs' of its 'impure Jews', who had 'sublimated immortality into compound interest'. This was for a talk to The Memoir Club, published only posthumously; it was his most prejudiced utterance on the subject, but it falls a long way short of the murderously flip remakes which even someone like Dennis Robertson was capable of making.11 (373-374)

Skidelsky went on to say that
[Such] stereotyping of Jews was common in Keynes's circle, and the stereotypes were usually unfavourable. Keynes's letters are mercifully free from personal abuse – not so Lydia's, or those of some Bloomsberries. Individual Jews were exempted by the devices of exceptionalism or non-recognition of their Jewishness. Thus was decency reconciled to prejudice. But the occasion for decency did not often arise. Although Virginia Woolf married a Jew12, and Sraffa and Wittgenstein were half-Jewish13, there were very few Jews in Keynes's world in the 1920s...meanwhile, stereotyping could flourish, and there was no need to mind manners...Keynes's own stereotyping took place on the philosophical, not vulgar, plane. (374)

Skidelsky characterized Keynes's views as grounded in the idea that Jews embodied the spirit of capitalism, which was associated with an abstract love of money. He argued that Keynes distinguished between pure or religious or intellectual Jews and money loving Jews. In this discussion Skidelsky noted a letter of complaint to Keynes by University of California Professor Max Raden about the Economic Possibilities essay, where Raden had told Keynes that not only was immortality unimportant theologically for Jews, but that Jews were not especially concerned with the accumulation of money. In his reply to Raden Keynes apologized for having been thinking along 'purely conventional lines' (ibid.). But he was reluctant to give up his fancy: 'I still think that the race has shown itself, not merely for accidental reasons, more than normally interested in the accumulation of usury.' This correspondence took place in the autumn of 1933.? (374) Skidelsky concluded this discussion by remarking ?Keynes anti-Semitism, if such it was, was little more than a theological fancy: expression, perhaps, of some unresolved conflict about his own Non-Conformist roots. There is no evidence that it influenced his personal conduct.? (374-375)

This is somewhat misleading. One hundred and fifty pages earlier in that 2003 volume Skidelsky addressed Keynes's dealings with Klotz, the French finance minister at the Versailles conference. Skidelsky quotes Keynes writing that Klotz was 'A short, plump, heavy-moustached Jew, well-groomed, well kept, but with an unsteady roving eye, and his shoulders were a little bent with instinctive depreciation.' Klotz represented, to Keynes, the other face of France's grasping sterility – a view not uninfluenced by the anti-semitism which was normal to his class and generation.? (222) Skidelsky then proceeded to quote from the Melchior essay15:
14 Skidelsky's reference for this quote is in error – it does not appear in the volume of Keynes's Collected Works where Skidelsky places it, but rather it appears in Keynes's biographical essay on Melchior, namely page 422 of Collected Works: Volume X (not XVI).
15 This essay was eventually published by Rupert Hart-Davis in 1949 as Two Memoirs. In the Collected Works, editor Moggridge states that it was certainly read before January 1932, and probably in the summer of 1931? (CWX, 387) to the Memoir Club.

Never have I seen the equal of the onslaught with which the poor man [Klotz] was overwhelmed [by Lloyd George who] had always hated and despised him; and now saw in a twinkling that he could kill him. Women and children were starving, he cried, and here was M. Klotz prating of his 'goold'. He leaned forward and with a gesture of his hands indicated the image of a hideous Jew clutching a money bag. His eyes flashed and the words came out with a contempt so violent that he seemed almost to be spitting at him...Everyone looked at Klotz... the poor man was bent over his seat, visibly cowering. (223-224)
What this passage in Skidelsky's one volume biography leaves out, with ellipses, is more than some unnecessary words. The penultimate sentence is actually the third from the last, and what is missing is Keynes's sentence The anti-Semitism, not far below the surface in such an assemblage as that one, was up in the heart of everyone.? (422) And the last ellipsis of the quoted passage replaced the words with a momentary contempt and hatred? (ibid). These edits should disturb attentive readers since the missing sentence and phrase lends credence to the idea, denied later in the one volume biography, that such anti-Semitism did influence Keynes's personal conduct at least in this instance. The point of course is not whether Keynes was an anti-Semite, but rather how material related to such an allegation was treated by, in this case, Keynes's primary biographer.

With respect to his earlier biographer, Roy Harrod's (1951) authorized The Life of John Maynard Keynes set out the limits of the discussion in the early postwar period. The question of Keynes's attitude to Jews is untouched, nor was there any mention of Keynes's bisexuality16. Skidelsky's Volume 1 (1986), and (especially) Moggridge's full biography of 1992 dealt with the issue of homosexuality in more detail, but the discussion of the Keynes's references to Jews are somewhat sketchy, but were addressed more fully in the one volume condensation in 2003. And other than the brief discussion of the issue by Mark Blaug (1994) in a joint review of Moggridge's and Skidelsky's books, I have found nothing whatsoever about anti-Semitism in any article or book review written about Keynes by the hundreds of historians of economics engaged with Keynes and his writings.

http://econ.duke.edu/~erw/Preprints/Fin ... s-Jews.pdf