Professor Robertson On Effective Demand And The Trade Cycle

To attempt a survey of Professor Robertson’s views on effective demand and the trade cycle, is a task which is extremely difficult, and perhaps impossible, to carry out satisfactorily. Four books by Professor Robertson have appeared since the end of the war, but three of these are new editions of earlier works to which only a small amount of new writing has been added. It is true that his new writing — in the form of two additional chapters in Money (1948), and new introductions to A Study of Industrial Fluctuation (1948), and to Banking Policy and the Price Level (1949)1 raises a host of intricate and important issues that deserve the closest attention; but there is no detailed positive statement of the position Professor Robertson would now adopt and his additions consist in the main of criticism of Keynesian economics and a vindication of earlier views on these matters. The post-war essays now brought together in the fourth volume, Utility and All That (1952), are also predominantly critical and do not include a systematic presentation of his own views on some of the topics with which we must deal.