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The central argument of The General Theory is that the level of employment is determined not by the price of labour, as in classical economics, but by the level of aggregate demand. If the total demand for goods at full employment is less than the total output, then the economy has to contract until equality is achieved.
Thus, full employment of labor corresponds to potential output. Whilst full employment is often an aim for an economy, most economists see it as more beneficial to have some level of unemployment, especially of the frictional sort. In theory, this keeps the labor market flexible, allowing room for new innovations and investment.
The result, as Hicks points out, is the false impression that Keynes assumed wages to be constant at any level of employment short of full employment. [33] He claimed that "Hicks' procedure is completely unnecessary". Keynes explicitly declares wages to be exogenous on p247.
Keynes interprets the relation between output and employment as a causative relation between effective demand and employment. He discusses what happens at full employment [16] concluding that wages and prices will rise in proportion to any additional expenditure leaving the real economy unchanged. The money supply remains constant in wage units ...
The classical economists took the theory of the determinants of the level and growth of population as part of Political Economy. Since then, the theory of population has been seen as part of Demography. In contrast to the Classical theory, the following determinants of the neoclassical theory value are seen as exogenous to neoclassical economics:
The majority of the classical and neoclassical orthodoxy agree that Say's law allows for an economy to maintain full employment as the mechanisms of equilibrium within capitalism allow for equality of aggregate supply and demand. [19] However, both Marx and Keynes refute the viability of Say's law occurring within the economy.
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Keynes believed the classical theory was a "special case" that applied only to the particular conditions present in the 19th century, his theory being the general one. Classical economists had believed in Say's law , which, simply put, states that " supply creates its demand ", and that in a free-market workers would always be willing to lower ...