Wages in ‘Free and Fair Competition’

Abstract

If we are to take journal citations as the measure of academic influence, then Michal Kalecki was not immediately recognised as one of the most important economists of his time. In his study of Ralph Hawtrey, Patrick Deutscher included a study of citations in the literature of macroeconomics and monetary theory in the inter-war period and during the Second World War. Obviously before 1936 the English-speaking world had no knowledge of the obscure Pole, since Kalecki had not published in English until 1936. Even after this, between 1936 and 1939, Kalecki’s work was not cited significantly. It was only during the Second World War that his work came to be more commonly referred to in the macroeconomics discussion. Deutscher has him ranked, by number of citations, as sixth after John Maynard Keynes, J.R. Hicks, Gottfried Haberler, Dennis Robertson, and Hawtrey. Kalecki appears in the ranking with the same number of citations as Keynes’s Austrian-American rival, Joseph Schumpeter, whose voluminous alternative explanation of the 1930s depression, Business Cycles was published in 1939. Much of Kalecki’s distinction was due to Keynes’s public acknowledgement that Kalecki’s wages theory was the one clearly implied in his General Theory.