Public-domain ebook

A Tract on Monetary Reform

Name: A Tract on Monetary Reform
Author: John Maynard Keynes

by John Maynard Keynes

Read now Add to library

Language: en1,808 downloads on Project Gutenberg

Subjects

Money Foreign exchange Currency question

In: Economics

Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #65278.

About this book

A Tract on Monetary Reform is a scholarly economic treatise by John Maynard Keynes, first published in October 1923. The work opens with a forceful argument that the instability of money, its fluctuating standard of value, underlies many social ills, from unemployment to the loss of savings. Keynes frames the problem in terms of three principal social groups, the investors, the business class, and the earners, showing how uneven price changes redistribute wealth and heighten risk. He then outlines the book’s structure, promising a detailed examination of how inflation and deflation affect distribution and production, a critique of prevailing monetary theories, and concrete policy suggestions for Britain, the United States, and other nations. The opening pages already set a tone of rigorous analysis grounded in recent statistics and historical comparison, positioning the text as a systematic inquiry into the consequences of monetary volatility.

The prose is unmistakably early‑twentieth‑century academic economics, combining formal argumentation with occasional rhetorical flourish. Keynes writes in a measured, authoritative voice, employing extensive data tables and references to contemporary publications such as the Manchester Guardian and the League of Nations statistics. Readers who enjoy dense, historically situated economic analysis, students of monetary history, scholars of Keynesian thought, or anyone interested in the policy debates that followed World War I, will find this book rewarding. Its focus on the interplay of money, risk, and social structure makes it particularly appealing to those studying the evolution of financial systems and the intellectual origins of modern macroeconomics.

The opening · free to read

We leave Saving to the private investor, and we encourage him to place his savings mainly in titles to money. We leave the responsibility for setting Production in motion to the business man, who is mainly influenced by the profits which he expects to accrue to himself in terms of money. Those who are not in favour of drastic changes in the existing organisation of society believe that these arrangements, being in accord with human nature, have great advantages. But they cannot work properly if the money, which they assume as a stable measuring-rod, is undependable. Unemployment, the precarious life of the worker, the disappointment of expectation, the sudden loss of savings, the excessive windfalls to individuals, the speculator, the profiteer--all proceed, in large measure, from the instability of the standard of value.

It is often supposed that the costs of production are threefold, corresponding to the rewards of labour, enterprise, and accumulation. But there is a fourth cost, namely risk; and the reward of risk-bearing is one of the heaviest, and perhaps the most avoidable, burden on production. This element of risk is greatly aggravated by the instability of the standard of value. Currency Reforms, which led to the adoption by this country and the world at large of sound monetary principles, would diminish the wastes of Risk, which consume at present too much of our estate.

Nowhere do conservative notions consider themselves more in place than in currency; yet nowhere is the need of innovation more urgent. One is often warned that a scientific treatment of currency questions is impossible because the banking world is intellectually incapable of understanding its own problems. If this is true, the order of Society, which they stand for, will decay. But I do not believe it. What we have lacked is a clear analysis of the real facts, rather than ability to understand an analysis already given. If the new ideas, now developing in many quarters, are sound and right, I do not doubt that sooner or later they will prevail. I dedicate this book, humbly and without permission, to the Governors and Court of the Bank of England, who now and for the future have a much more difficult and anxious task entrusted to them than in former days.