Comparing the Deliberate Omissions of R. Harrod in His 1951 Biography of J M Keynes With the Deliberate Omissions of R.Skidelsky in the Second Volume of His 1992 Biography of J M Keynes: The Source of All Heterodox Claims About ’Many Gaping Holes‘, Gaps', and ‘Deeply Serious Flaws’ in Keynes’s General Theory Can All Be Traced to Joan Robinson

Abstract

In the first volume of his biography of Keynes(1983),R. Skidelsky showed that R.Harrod,in 1951 in his biography on Keynes, had deliberately omitted relevant evidence about the life of J M Keynes,such as his gay sexual life up until 1921 and his conscientious objector status during WW I.Skidelsky(1983,pp.xv-xxviii) showed how Harrod had sought to give a misleading account of Keynes’s life by the deliberate omission of materials and selective quotations taken from Keynes’s letters of correspondence (1983,p.xxiii) that Harrod believed would bias readers against Keynes’s 1936 General Theory. Unfortunately, R.Skidelsky has done exactly the same thing in the second volume of his three volume biography of Keynes as Harrod had done in 1951.Skidelsky has deliberately omitted relevant evidence regarding the roles played by Joan Robinson and Richard Kahn during the years Keynes was writing the General Theory and defending it against the mainstream neoclassical school of economics in the years from 1930 to 1937. Skidelsky accepted Joan Robinson’s claims that (a) there were all kinds of gaping holes, gaps, and serious flaws in Keynes’s General Theory and that (b) Richard Kahn invented, developed and explained the multiplier concept to Keynes. This allowed Keynes to write the General Theory. Therefore, without Kahn’s personal instruction of Keynes , whereby Kahn was able to help Keynes with mathematical analysis which Keynes supposedly did not really understand, there would have been no General Theory written by Keynes. Skidelsky deliberately omitted the September through November,1936, correspondence contained in Volume 14 of the Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes on pp.134-148 between Keynes and Robinson that showed a reader that Joan Robinson not only had no idea about what Keynes’s liquidity preference theory of the rate of interest involved ,but that the comments in her proposed book on liquidity preference, published in 1937, were nothing more than “nonsense. All of her comments on liquidity preference were withdrawn before her book was published. Skidelsky deliberately omitted the 1936 exchanges between Hans Niesser and Richard Kahn over the theory of the multiplier because it contains an incredible, startling admission on Kahn’s part,which was that Kahn’s ideas about the multiplier came directly from Keynes. Kahn had never explained the multiplier concept to Keynes and Keynes’s mathematics was not rusty. Keynes had developed and applied the multiplier some 10 and 2 years, respectively, before Kahn’s June, 1931 paper was published in the Economic Journal. Skidelsky deliberately omitted any mention of F. Y. Edgeworth’s two reviews of Keynes’s A Treatise on Probability because Edgeworth’s two reviews directly challenge and contradict the claims made by Frank Ramsey in his 1922 and 1926 reviews .Edgeworth clearly identifies Keynes’s theory of probability as an interval valued theory that is not mysterious at all, identifies the importance of Keynes’s finite probabilities in Part III of the A Treatise on Probability on analogy ,identifies the possible importance of Keynes’s conventional coefficient of weight and risk, c , in Part IV, and acknowledges Keynes’s development of a method, based on Chebyshev’s Inequality, of establishing a lower bound on risk for decision makers in Part V. Any reader, who is familiar with Edgeworth’s two reviews of Keynes’s A Treatise on Probability,which contain no mention of any of Ramsey’s claims, would have grave and serious doubts about Skidelsky’s claim that the boy genius had demolished Keynes’s theory in a 1 hour presentation made in 1925. Skidelsky’s deliberate omission of this relevant evidence is due to his attempt to support Joan Robinson’s claims about gap and holes in Keynes’s General Theory that needed to be filled so as to complete the Keynesian revolution,where Joan Robinson’s claims would represent the “true” legacy of the so called ”unfinished “ Keynesian Revolution.How a mathematically illiterate like Joan Robinson was able to detect gaping holes is unclear.What is very clear is Robinson’s complete and total failure to grasp the D-Z model of chapter 20, which underlies the IS-LM model of chapter 21, as well as Keynes’s multiple equilibria as specified by Keynes’s Aggregate Supply Curve.