What Attracted Keynes to Malthus’s High Price of Provisions?

Authors

  • Nobuhiko Nakazawa Kansai University, Japan

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.23941/ejpe.v10i2.247

Keywords:

John Maynard Keynes, Thomas Robert Malthus, effective demand, poverty, unemployment

Abstract

In his biographical essay on Malthus, Keynes highly praised Malthus’s early short pamphlet, High Price of Provisions. Yet there have been remarkably few commentators who have paid attention to High Price of Provisions; and fewer have taken notice of two underlying but importantly related problems hidden in Keynes’s analysis of this pamphlet. This paper attempts to resolve these problems by providing a more comprehensive explanation for Keynes’s discussion of High Price of Provisions than Keynes himself. Not only does this paper reinforce the idea that Keynes discovered the concept of effective demand by reading Malthus, but it further proposes that Keynes would have seen other parallels between himself and Malthus, including their methods of approaching practical economic problems.

Author Biography

Nobuhiko Nakazawa, Kansai University, Japan

Nobuhiko Nakazawa is Professor of History of Economic Thought at Kansai University, Japan, where he has taught since 1998. His research interests lie in the fields of history of economic thought and methodology, particularly issues relating to Edmund Burke, Thomas Robert Malthus and British conservatism. He is former president of the Japanese Society of Malthus (2009–2011). He has published papers in journals such as Modern Age and History of Economics Review.

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Published

2017-12-21

How to Cite

Nakazawa, N. (2017). What Attracted Keynes to Malthus’s High Price of Provisions?. Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, 10(2), 24–44. https://doi.org/10.23941/ejpe.v10i2.247