The Economics of Keynes and Uncertainty in Theory

Modern academic and political establishments generally accept Keynesian economics as the primary theoretical work regarding The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes. However, the discipline of economics has been unable to fully understand Keynes’s ideas, even after almost a century of intense scrutiny since its publication in 1936. This book argues that this is due to the field’s failure to recognize the central theme of Keynes’s ideas, uncertainty. When people do not have all the relevant information on which to base their decisions, they can only act in ways which they believe are in their best interest, or fall back on conventions. Keynes’s work elucidates the conventions which people fall back on to cope with uncertainty in economic life. With this in mind, this book builds upon Keynes’s ideas on uncertainty and conventions, and offers an alternative view of Keynes’s work, which constitutes the foundation of modern economics.