Harry G. Johnson as a Chronicler of the Keynesian Revolution

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  July, 2001  

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In later years, Johnson became very critical of the hostile treatment of Dennis Robertson by the younger Keynesians at Cambridge. According to Johnson (1974:139), Robertson "had been prevented from receiving what he (and many others) considered was the final reward of a serious academic career, namely the professorship at Cambridge; for that reason he had gone to the London School of Economics as a professor" but "[alt the end of the war, when it was clear that Keynes was never going to come back to academic life," Robertson was persuaded to accept the chair at Cambridge. However, Robertson (or anyone else) could not have received the chair until Pigou retired in 1943. When Pigou retired, the chair was offered to Keynes (as is hinted at in Johnson's aside about Keynes not returning to academic life), who declined the offer and urged the election of Robertson. Since Lord Keynes had been Robertson's teacher and was at the centre of the discipline's attention by 1943, offering the chair to Keynes, with Robertson as second choice, does not seem as unreasonable as Johnson suggests. Johnson may not have been aware of a possible explanation of the virulence of Robinson's attitude toward Robertson: in the 1930s, Robertson, then chair of the Faculty Board, had tried to keep her from lecturing at Cambridge and was among those who delayed her appointment as a University Lecturer until 1938[2], five years after her Economics of Imperfect Competition (Robinson 1933) and after her books and essays on the Keynesian theory of employment (Robinson 1937a, 1937b) had made her one of the most-cited macroeconomists (see Moggridge 1992:599--601).

III

Monetary Theory and Keynesian Economics

"MONETARY THEORY AND KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS" (Johnson 1958), one of five lectures Harry Johnson delivered in Karachi in July 1956 to the Pakistan Refresher Course for Economists sponsored by the International Economic Association and the Pakistan Economic Association, reveals Harry Johnson as still a committed Keynesian, albeit with reservations about Keynesian inattention to money and to what determines the money wage. According to Johnson,

It is agreed, I think, that Keynesian theory provided a far better basis for understanding the nature of the war-time economic problem and the causes of inflation than did previous theory. It made it clear that the war-time economic problem is not the financing of the war effort but the adjustment of aggregate demand to the capacity of the economy to produce; and the source of inflation is an excess demand for output. (1958: 124)

His analysis of inflation at the time was thus based more on Keynes's How to Pay for the War (1940) than on the quantity theory of money, although he did not provide an explicit citation of Keynes's pamphlet. Johnson acknowledged that "[i]t is clear that the accumulation of money during the war has had an important effect; but I would myself prefer to employ a neo-Keynesian explanation, based on the accumulation of assets relative to income (these assets including both money and Government debt) rather than one which stressed the quantity of money per se" (ibid., p. 124).