consensus rather than supports one school over another. | think it is the consensus view, as well as Keynes’, that his “attempted saving” means gross saving (gross income less consumption) not invested in new productive assets. That can be
written as
Keynesian attempted saving - transfer payments
= Keynesian net saving = Keynesian net investment,
at any scale.
| accept Keynes’ definition of transfer payments, and | recognize the importance of his distinction of those from investment in new productive assets which put idle plant and workers to work. My interpretation, even so, is that it is better to leave them idle than to put them to work unproductively. Keynes made his opposite view crystal-clear with his brilliant tongue-in-cheek parable of money buried in mineshafts and idle workers hired to dig it up. He had a sense of theater as well as a great mind. And he just might have been right. But I think my way of putting things encompasses that possibility. His mineshaft scenario works if it somehow
maximizes return in the big picture.
My language differs from Keynes’ in several ways. I prefer Myrdal’s ex ante - ex post dichotomy, published three years after the General Theory, to Keynes’ equivalent attempted-realized one. Like Myrdal, and unlike Keynes, I apply it to investment as well as saving. That’s why | treat them as synonymous. And | prefer to recognize human capital explicitly. Keynes surely understood the concept. He was the star pupil of Alfred Marshall's later teaching career, unless he shared that distinction with his lifelong personal friend and professional adversary Arthur Pigou, and Marshall and Pigou both describe human capital in principle. Marshall wrote that he neglected it as something outside what he saw as the main sequence ending with consumption. Keynes could have agreed, or could have meant to provide for it
implicitly by defining output as investment plus consumption while realizing that
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