> Ted's right that Keynes himself didn't have such a research program,
> but wrong that his ideas didn't lead to one. A number of the above
> work from a criticism of Keynes, that he did not pay enough attention
> to the stock of financial wealth.
Actually, as I've many times spelled out and as I just did again, Keynes did have a "research program", one constituted by the ontological, anthropological and psychological premises I just summarized. These underpin his analysis of financial markets including, as an essential part of this, his analysis of the "waves of irrational psychology" to which they are subject because of the form of psychopathology dominant in them.
The Post Keynesians to whom you point aren't pursuing this research program. They ignore, and, in several cases, explicitly deny that these are Keynes's premises, that is, they ignore or deny that Keynes's analysis of financial markets assumes the following:
1. that "there are insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men" so that "the view that human nature is reasonable" is "disastrously mistaken" (Collected Writings, vol. X, p. 447), an assumption whose assertion and elaboration is found in a "memoir", "My Early Beliefs", Keynes took the trouble to arrange in his will should be published after his death;
2. that, consistent with with this assumption, "the essential characteristic of capitalism" is "the dependence upon an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals as the main motive force of the economic machine";
3. that, elaborating this, "the love of money as possession" is "a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi- pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease" and the capitalist's "purposiveness" is an attempt "to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time";
4. that, in the specific case of financial markets:
"The vast majority of those who are concerned with the buying and selling of securities know almost nothing whatever about what they are doing. They do not possess even the rudiments of what is required for a valid judgment, and are the prey of hopes and fears easily aroused by transient events and as easily dispelled. This is one of the odd characteristics of the capitalist system under which we live, which, when we are dealing with the real world, is not to be overlooked."
all these assumptions underpinning the following summary of the role of "liquidity preference" in the crisis phase of the "waves of irrational psychology" that constitute booms and busts in financial markets:
"partly on reasonable and partly on instinctive grounds, our desire to hold money as a store of wealth is a barometer of the degree of our distrust of our own calculations and conventions concerning the future. Even though this feeling about money is itself conventional or instinctive, it operates, so to speak, at a deeper level of our motivation. It takes charge at the moments when the higher, more precarious conventions have weakened. The possession of actual money lulls our disquietude; and the premium which we require to make us part with money is the measure of the degree of our disquietude."
You're also misunderstanding the mistaken kind of "individualism" to which Keynes objected. He, like Marx, explicitly rejected your idea that "wholes" can be treated as separate and independent of the "individuals" that constitute them, i.e. he claimed that
"one must ever remember Paley's dictum that 'although we speak of communities as of sentient beings and ascribe to them happiness and misery, desires, interests and passions, nothing really exists or feels but individuals'." (vol. X, p. 449)
What he objected to was "atomism", the treatment of the relations of "individuals" as "external" rather than "internal".
As I've also just once more explained, this limits the role of axiomatic deductive, including mathematical, reasoning; a limitation the misidentification of such reasoning with "science" by many "Post Keynesians", e.g. Paul Davidson, ignores, as does the same misidentification by many "Marxists", e.g. by those who treat Marx's "science" as a species of "econophysics".
In the latter case, the "dialectical" essence of Marx's "critique of political economy" as exemplified by his treatment of the "business of science" in terms of Hegel's "higher dialectic of the conception" is ignored. This includes the treatment of capitalist motives as "passions" as Hegel's sense. This underpins Marx's explanation of "monetary crises", an explanation having significant aspects in common with Keynes's (Keynes also treating capitalist motives as "passions" in Hegel's sense).
This mistake re the role of axiomatic deductive reasoning is connected to mistaken Post Keynesian treatments of money, mistaken treatments that Keynes attributed to "“a deep-seated obsession associating idle balances … with some aspect of current saving.” The most obvious instance is the "circuitist" version of Post Keynesianism dominant in France, as I pointed out long ago on the now defunct PKT list:
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pkt/2002m01/msg00111.htm
Another is Basil Moore's idea of "convenience saving", as I pointed out to him even longer ago in the following interchange on the same list:
http://marx.econ.utah.edu/archives/pkt/1999m09-e/msg00042.htm http://marx.econ.utah.edu/archives/pkt/1999m10-a/msg00006.htm http://marx.econ.utah.edu/archives/pkt/1999m10-c/msg00004.htm
Ted