ke Say's Law at face value and depend upon the assumption that economic systems tend automatically to full employment. By keeping his attention focused on macroeconomic aggregates, like total consumption and total investment, and by deliberately simplifying the relations one saw between these economic variables, Keynes was able to devise a versatile yet powerful model that could be applied to a wide range of practical problems concerning the economy and public policy concerning it.. His system was not perfect, however, and subsequently underwent considerable refinement and this refinement worked so well that Keynes ideas became so thoroughly assimilated into the body of received doctrine that the statement was made, "we are all Keynesians now." Still, it is not too much to say that Keynes is perhaps the only economist to have added something really new to economics since the classical economists. He declared existing explanations of unemployment to be nonsense. Keynes wrote that neither high prices nor high wages could explain the persistent depression and mass unemployment that was being experienced in his day. Instead, he proposed an alternative explanation for these happenings phenomena. His explanation focused on what he termed aggregate demandthat is, the total spending of consumers, business investors, and governmental bodies. When aggregate demand is low, he theorized, sales and jobs suffer; when it is high, all is well and prosperous.Keynes ideas on the theories of ownership of resources and property are discussed in the following paragraph. Keynes specifically rejected the need for public or government ownership of the means of production. What did concern Keynes was the aggregate outcomes in the economy. He therefore did not direct his attention in The General Theory to the issues of what should be produced and how. He believed that this was not necessary to his theories or that it would matter that much anyway. When speaki...
