Uneasy Money

In my previous post on Keynes and Hawtrey, I tried to show the close resemblance between their upbringing and education and early careers. It becomes apparent that Keynes’s brilliance, and perhaps also his more distinguished family connections, had already enabled Keynes to begin overshadowing Hawtrey, four years his senior, as Keynes was approaching his thirties, and by 1919, when Hawtrey was turning 40, Keynes, having achieved something close to superstardom with the publication of The Econoomic Consequences of the Peace, had clearly eclipsed Hawtrey as a public figure, though as a pure monetary theoretician Hawtrey still had a claim to be the more influential of the two. For most of the 1920s, their relative standing did not change greatly, Hawtrey writing prolifically for economics journals as well as several volumes on monetary theory and a general treatise on economics, but without making much of an impression on broader public opinion, while Keynes, who continued to write primarily for a non-professional, though elite, audience, had the much higher public profile.

In the mid-1920s Keynes began writing his first systematic work on monetary theory and policy, the Treatise on Money. The extent to which Keynes communicated with Hawtrey about the Treatise in the five or six years during which he was working on it is unknown to me, but Keynes did send Hawtrey the proofs of the Treatise (totaling over 700 pages) in installments between April and July 1930. Hawtrey sent Keynes detailed comments, which Keynes later called “tremendously useful,” but, except for some minor points, Keynes could not incorporate most of the lengthy comments, criticisms or suggestions he received from Hawtrey before sending the final version of the Treatise to the publisher on September 14. Keynes did not mention Hawtrey in the preface to the Treatise, in which D. H. Robertson, R. F. Kahn, and H. D. Henderson were acknowledged for their assistance. Hawtrey would be mentioned along with Kahn, Joan Robinson, and Roy Harrod in the preface to the General Theory, but Hawtrey’s role in the preparation of the General Theory will be the subject of my next installment in this series. Hawtrey published his comments on the Treatise in his 1932 volume The Art of Central Banking.

Not long after the Treatise was published, and almost immediately subjected to critical reviews by Robertson and Hayek, among others, Keynes made it known that he was dissatisfied with the argument of the Treatise, and began work on what would eventually evolve into the General Theory. Hawtrey’s discussion was especially notable for two criticisms.  First Hawtrey explained that Keynes’s argument that an excess of investment over saving caused prices to rise was in fact a tautology entailed by Keynes’s definition of savings and investment.

[T]he fundamental equations disclose . . . that the price level is composed of two terms, one of which is cost per unit and the other is the difference between price and cost per unit.

Thus the difference between saving and investment is simply another name for the windfall gains or losses or for the difference between prices and costs of output. Throughout the Treatise Mr. Keynes adduces a divergence between saving and investment as the criterion of a departure from monetary equilibrium. But this criterion is nothing more or less than a divergence between prices and costs. Though the criterion ostensibly depends on two economic activities, “investment” and “saving,” it depends in reality not on them but on movements of the price level relative to costs.

That does not mean that the price level may not be influenced by changes in investment or in saving in some sense. But Mr. Keynes’s formula does not record such changes till their effect upon the price level is an accomplished fact. (p. 336)

Hawtrey’s other important criticism was his observation that Keynes assumed that a monetary disequilibrium would manifest itself exclusively in price changes and not at all in changes in output and employment. In fact this criticism followed naturally from Hawtrey’s criticism of Keynes’s definitions of savings and investment, from which the fundamental equations were derived, as not being grounded in the decisions of consumers and entrepreneurs.

With regard to savings, the individual consumers decide what they shall spend (or refrain from spending) on consumption. The balance of their earnings is “savings.” But the balance of their incomes (earnings plus windfall gains) is “investment.” Their decisions determine the amount of investment just as truly and in just the same way as they determine the amount of savings.

For all except entrepreneurs, earnings and income are the same. For entrepreneurs they differ if, and only if, there is a windfall gain or loss. But if there is a windfall gains, the recipients must decide what to do with it exactly as with any other receipt. If there is a windfall loss, the victims are deemed, according to Mr. Keynes’s definition of saving, to “save” the money they do not receive. But this is the result of the definition, not of any “decision.” (p. 345)

Preferring the more natural definition of savings as unconsumed income and of investment as capital outlay, Hawtrey proceeded to suggest an alternative analysis of an increase in saving by consumers. In the alternative analysis both output and prices could vary. It was Hawtrey therefore who provided the impetus for a switch to output and employment, not just prices, as equilibrating variable to a monetary disequilibrium.

It has been pointed out above that a difference between savings and investment [as defined by Keynes] cannot be regarded as the cause of a windfall loss or gain, for it is the windfall loss or gain. To find a causal sequence, we must turn to the decisions relating to consumption and capital outlay. When we do so, we find the windfall loss or gain to be one only among several consequences, and neither the earliest, nor necessarily the most important.

Throughout the Treatise Mr. Keynes refers to these decisions, and bases his argument upon them. And I think it is true to say that almost everywhere what he says may be interpreted as applying to the modified analysis which we have arrived at just as well as to that embodied in his fundamental equations. (p. 349)

To a large extent, Hawtrey’s criticisms of Keynes were criticisms of Keynes’s choice of definitions and the formal structure of his model rather than of the underlying theoretical intuition motivating Keynes’s theoretical apparatus. Hawtrey made this point in correcting Keynes’s misinterpretation of Hawtrey’s own position.

Mr. Keynes attributes to me (rather tentatively, it is true) acceptance of the view of “Bank rate as acting directly on the quantity of bank credit and so on prices in accordance with the Quantity Equation” (vol. 1., p. 188). But the passage which he quotes from my Currency and Credit contains no reference, explicit or implicit, to the quantity equation. Possibly I have misled him by using the expression “contraction of credit” for what I have sometimes called more accurately a “retardation of the creation of credit.”

The doctrine that I have consistently adhered to, that an acceleration or retardation of the creation of credit acts through changes in consumers’ income and outlay on the price level and on productive activity, and not through changes in the unspent margin [Hawtrey’s term of holdings of cash], is, I think, very close to Mr. Keynees’s theory. (p. 363)

In drawing attention to his belief “that an acceleration or retardation of the creation of credit acts through changes in consumers’ income and outlay . . . not through changes in the unspent margin,” Hawtrey emphasized that his monetary theory was not strictly speaking a quantity-theoretic monetary theory, as Keynes had erroneously suggested. Rather, he shared with Keynes the belief that there is a tendency for changes in expenditure and income to be cumulative. It was Hawtrey’s belief that the most reliable method by which such changes in income and expenditure could be realized was by way of changes in the short-term interest rate, which normally cause businesses and traders to alter their desired stocks of unfinished goods, working capital and inventories. Those changes, in turn, lead to increases in output and income and consumer outlay, which trigger further increases, and so on. In short, as early as 1913, Hawtrey had already sketched out in Good and Bad Trade the essential concept of a multiplier process initiated by changes in short-term interest rates, by way of their effect on desired stocks of working capital and inventories.

Thus, it is a complete misunderstanding of Hawtrey to suggest that, in the words of Peter Clarke (The Keynesian Revolution in the Making  pp. 242-43) that he was “the man who, having stumbled upon [the multiplier], painstakingly suppressed news of its discovery in his subsequent publications.” The multiplier analysis was not stumbled upon, nor was it suppressed. Rather, Hawtrey simply held that, under normal conditions, unless supported by credit expansion (i.e., a lower bank rate), increased government spending would be offset by reduced spending elsewhere producing no net increase in spending and therefore no multiplier effect. In fact, Hawtrey in 1931 in his Trade Depression and the Way Out (or perhaps only in the second 1933 edition of that book) conceded that under conditions of what he called a “credit deadlock” in which businesses could not be induced to borrow to increase spending, monetary policy would not be effective unless it was used to directly finance government spending. In Keynesian terminology, the situation was described as a liquidity trap, and we no refer to it as the zero lower bound. But the formal analysis of the multiplier was a staple of Hawtrey’s cycle theory from the very beginning. It was just kept in the background, not highlighted as in the Keynesian analysis. But it was perfectly natural for Hawtrey to have explained how Keynes could use it in his commentary on the Treatise.

UPDATE (03/12/13): In reading the excellent doctoral thesis of Alan Gaukroger about Hawtrey’s career at the British Treasury (to view and download the thesis click here) to which I refer in my reply to Luis Arroyo’s comment, I realized that Hawtrey did not introduce the terms “consumers’ income” and “consumers’ outlay” in Good and Bad Trade as I asserted in the post.  Those terms were only introduced six years later in Currency and Credit. I will have to reread the relevant passages more carefully to determine to what extent the introduction of the new terms in Currency and Credit represented an actual change in Hawtrey’s conceptual framework as opposed to the introduction of a new term for an a concept that he had previously worked out.