The Purchasing Power of Money

In his review of this book in 1911, John Maynard Keynes drew attention to the “remarkable contrast” between the state of debate over monetary issues in the United States and in Britain. The fact that monetary affairs had been at the heart of American political controversy had sparked the production of a considerable polemical literature by economists on that side of the Atlantic. In England, by contrast, academic economists had been spared such Sturm und Drang. In consequence, they had largely been silent in print on these matters – a phenomenon which had “greatly hindered the progress of the science.”