Keynes

Reading: The General Theory of Unemployment, Interest and Money

Study Group to re-read Keynes in the original -- Please see facebook post to join in discussion on topics under study, and also the concept of the study group. This is home page for the study group.

I have now SHIFTED this Study Group to a different website -- this website is my ROUGH work website, I will use it to develop drafts and links, but the CLEAN version of material, with more thought and refinement, will be posted on the new website linked below:

Study Group for Reading Keynes.

26 Oct 2016: Starting with preliminary and background materials on this page. Those who have time can watch movie Grapes of Wrath, or read book. This provides the cultural/social background, which cannot be separated from the economics and politics. The idea that economics can be studied is isolation from other aspects is simply wrong.

NEXT Step: Reading of Preliminaries (currently under preparation)

The whole idea of "Social Science" is a mistake. There are no universal laws which apply to the study of human beings and society. The entire body of knowledge generated under this name, Western Social Science, is deeply flawed because it is built upon wrong foundations. This theme is elaborated in my paper "Deification of Science and its Disastrous Consequences" Instead of dwelling on explaining these flaws, we proceed to consider how to rectify them.

First, history is a collection of facts, but this collection cannot be understood without theories of human and social behavior. These theories create coherence and sequencing in a set of facts. These theories are the background knowledge that we use in selecting the relevant facts to describe and prioritizing what is chosen as important explanatory factors.

Theories are generated in the process of trying to understand collections of historical facts, and to explain these facts via causal linkages, which is what constitutes explanation.

There is a DEEP interaction between historical context and social theories. Social theories are born out of the effort to understand history -- so such theories cannot be understood in isolation, without their historical context. But at the same time, history cannot be understood without theories which provide sense, sequence and causal linkages. Therefore it is essential to study theories and history together -- how twists and turns in history led to the generation of theories and how these theories led to different understandings of history.

In our study of Keynes: The General Theory, we will try to describe the historical background in which these theories were born. This will provide much deeper insights and understanding of the Keynesian theories, which cannot be properly understood without this context.

0: Preliminaries: Gives the basic ideas and background. The main paper to be studied is also on this page