Keynes por sí mismo. Citas de Keynes contra sus peores enemigos, los keynesianos

Estas notas están sacadas del "Keynes Betrayed" de Geoff Tily. Están referidas a la virulenta discusión dialéctica entre Keynes y sus intérpretes, entre los que destaca Hicks. Son citas de Keynes, posteriores a su libro (de ahí su interés), de artículos  y correspondencia. 

En ellas vemos las divergencias básicas que separan a Keynes de los neoclasicos, y del intento de fusión entre ambos bandos por sus seguidores. Las diferencias básicas son: 

• La Falacia de la composición: el comportamiento individual correcto no lleva a una solución colectiva optima.
• La incertidumbre. La incertidumbre, por definición no calculable como el riesgo, condiciona aleatoriamente las expectativas de los inversores. Pueden pasar largos periodos en que el pesimismo impida alcanzar una inversión de pleno empleo. 
• La inversión es el componente del gasto más importante, pero más volátil, por la presencia de la incertidumbre sobre la valoración de la rentabilidad esperada. 
• El tipo de interés no es producto del ahorro y la inversión. El tipo de interés es fruto de los cambios en la demanda de dinero. La incertidumbre, que afecta a la inversión, influye también en el deseo de atesorar liquidez. La caída de la inversión y el aumento de la demanda de liquidez responden a la misma causa. 
• El dinero es un activo de reserva como cualquier otro activo, pero además tiene la cualidad de la liquidez absoluta. Su demanda es estable en tiempos "normales", pero no suele haber tiempos normales prolongados. Suele haber expansiones más allá de lo aconsejable en los que se forman deudas, y periodos prolongados de ajuste, en los que las deudas acumuladas y el pesimismo de las expectativas impiden volver al pleno empleo. 
• Este carácter fluctuante de las expectativas hacen imposible construir modelos matemáticos con parámetros fijos. 

Leamos a Keynes.

Sobre las ciclos alcistas y bajistas: 

It is of the nature of organised investment markets, under the influence of purchasers largely ignorant of what they are buying and of speculators who are more concerned with forecasting the next shift of market sentiment than with a reasonable estimate of the future yield of capital-assets, that, when disillusion falls upon an over-optimistic and over-bought market, it should fall with sudden and even catastrophic force.

As these financial developments occur, the MEC will be shifting towards a less optimistic position. Firms will know that their revenues from investments made during the expansion phase are failing to meet the expectations that led them to borrow in the first place. They will re-adjust the MEC to a more realistic position. At the same time the failure of confidence in financial markets will cause liquidity preference and risk premia to increase, leading to a sharp rise in the rate of interest. 

Sobre la importancia de las deudas contraídas sobre la Debt Deflation:

The ‘force’ that brings an economy operating outside its long-run equilibrium back to (or rather back through) that equilibrium is debt. The degree of indebtedness is then a measure of the excess of the expansion, and will equally prevent the automatic recovery in the way predicted by classical economics.

Sobre la falacia de la composición: 

We are traditionally the party of laissez-faire . But just as the economists led the party into this policy, so I hope they may lead them out again. It is not true that individuals acting separately in their own economic interest always produce the best results. It is obvious that an individualist society left to itself does not work well or even tolerably. Here I agree with Labour. I differ from them not in the desirability of state action in the common interest, but as to the forms which such interference should take. Their proposals are out of date and contrary to human nature. But it is not safe or right just to leave things alone. It is our duty to think out wise controls and workable interferences. Now there is no part of our economic system which works so badly as our monetary and credit arrangements; none where the results of bad working are so disastrous socially; and none where it is easier to propose a scientific solution. ( CW XIX, Vol. I, pp. 158–9) 

Sobre la política de inversión pública: 

 I am in favour of an admixture of public works, but my feeling is that unless you socialise the country to a degree that is unlikely, you will get to the end of the public works program, if not in one year, in two years, and therefore if you are not prepared to reduce the rate of interest and bring back private enterprise, when you get to the end of the public works program you have shot your bolt, and you are no better off. I should use the public works program to fill in the interegnum [ sic ] while I was getting interest down. The public works program would in itself increase business profits, and therefore relieve people from that exceptional unwillingness to borrow. I should be afraid of that as a sole remedy. I should be afraid it would work itself out, come to an end, and then we should be back where we were unless we decided on a very definite further action. (Norman Wait Harris Memorial Foundation 1931, as cited in Kent, 2004, p. 205)

Sobre su visión escéptica de la política monetaria como único instrumento:

Anyone who is well acquainted with my writings will, however, be aware that I am not one of those who believe that the business cycle can be controlled solely by manipulation of the short-term rate of interest, that I am indeed a strong critic of this view, and that I have paid much attention to alternative and supplementary methods of controlling the rate of interest. Since, however, myths once started are persistent, it may be unwise of me to allow this representation of my argument to pass uncorrected. My proposals for the control of the business cycle are based on the control of investment . I have explained in detail that the most effective ways of controlling investment vary according to circumstances; and I have been foremost to point out that circumstances can arise, and have arisen recently, when neither control of the short-term rate of interest nor even control of the long-term rate will be effective, with the result that direct stimulation of investment by government is the necessary means. ( CW XI, p. 435) 3

Divergencias con  los principios neoclasicos y sus consecuencias:

Now the school which believes in self-adjustment is, in fact, assuming that the rate of interest adjusts itself more or less automatically, so as to encourage just the right amount of production of capital goods to keep our incomes at the maximum level which our energies and our organisation and our knowledge of how to produce efficiently are capable of providing. This is, however, pure assumption. There is no theoretical reason for believing it to be true. . . . Those standing on my side of the gulf, whom I have ventured to describe as half-right and half-wrong, have perceived this; and they conclude that the only remedy is for us to change the distribution of wealth and modify our habits in such a way as to increase our propensity to spend our incomes on current consumption. I agree with them in thinking that this would be a remedy. But I disagree with them when they go further and argue that this is the only remedy. For there is an alternative, namely, to increase the output of capital goods by reducing the rate of interest and in other ways. ( CW XIII, p. 490) 

La importancia crucial de la incertidumbre en su teoría 

 [O]ur desire to hold money as a store of wealth is a barometer of the degree of our distrust of our own calculations and conventions concerning the future. Even though this feeling about money is itself conventional or instinctive, it operates, so to speak, at a deeper level of our motivation. It takes charge at the moments when the higher, more precarious conventions have weakened. The possession of actual money lulls our disquietude; . . .( CW XIV, p. 116)  second, the impact of uncertainty on investment: It is not surprising that the volume of investment, thus determined, should fluctuate widely from time to time. For it depends on two sets of judgements about the future, neither of which rests on an adequate or secure foundation –on the propensity to hoard and on opinions of the future yield of capital assets. ( CW XIV, p. 118) After the discussion of investment he makes a statement that is exactly applicable to Hicks: 
This completes the first chapter of the argument, 

namely, the liability of the scale of investment to fluctuate for reasons quite distinct ( a ) from those which determine the propensity to save out of a given income and ( b ) from those physical conditions of technical capacity to aid production which have usually been supposed hitherto to be the chief influence governing the marginal efficiency of capital. If, on the other hand, our knowledge of the future was calculable and not subject to sudden changes, it might be justifiable to assume that the liquidity-preference curve was both stable and very inelastic. ( CW XIV, pp. 118–19)

Sobre la imprecisón inevitable de las expectativas  

For the rate of interest and the marginal efficiency of capital are particularly concerned with the indefinite character of actual expectations; they sum up the effect on men’s market decisions of all sorts of vague doubts and fluctuating states of confidence and courage. They belong, that is to say, to a stage of our theory where we are no longer assuming a definite and calculable future. The orthodox theory, on the other hand, is concerned with a simplified world where there is always full employment, and where doubt and fluctuations of confidence are ruled out,