Keynes is widely accepted to have proved the existence of a consumption gap as a cause of economic depressions. Such a gap meant that, ironically, depressions could get worse as a result of the greater wealth produced by the modern economy, since, as Keynes argued, the wealthy consumed proportionately less than the lower?income groups. Textual analysis, however, shows that Keynes's arguments amounted to assumptions, not demonstrations. And a survey of the empirical research of the subsequent half?century reveals a lack of (...) convincing evidence of the consumption gap. (shrink)

Roger Garrison's commentary on Alan Meltzer's interpretation of Keynes and Meltzer's interpretation itself are closer to each other and further from Keynes's sense than one might imagine. Keynes's logic rests on an unsubstantiated guess, as Keynes admitted, about the tendency for consumption to stagnate in an advanced economy; and on the nonsensical proposition that the possessors of loanable funds are unilaterally able to determine the cost of those funds outside of the supply‐and‐demand financial market.

THE MEANING OF KARL MARX by Bruce Mazlish New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. 188 pp., $17.95.