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4 - “Too Bad to Be True”: Swedish Economists on Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace and German Reparations, 1919–29

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2023

Patricia Clavin
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Giancarlo Corsetti
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Maurice Obstfeld
Affiliation:
Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington DC
Adam Tooze
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
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Summary

This chapter examines the response of five prominent Swedish economists, David Davidson, Gustav Cassel, Eli Heckscher, Knut Wicksell and Bertil Ohlin, to John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace and to the German reparations in the 1920s. When Keynes’s book appeared, Davidson and Cassel strongly endorsed it. Heckscher also agreed with Keynes in a long review entitled “Too Bad to Be True”. Inspired by his Malthusian view, Wicksell found the reparations feasible if only German population growth was arrested. The contacts between the Swedes and Keynes became close after Keynes’s book, in particular between Cassel and Keynes. The exchange of views took a new turn when Bertil Ohlin responded to an article by Keynes in The Economic Journal in 1929 on the transfer problem. The famous Keynes–Ohlin discussion laid the foundation for the analysis of the transfer problem, bringing Ohlin international recognition. We also trace how Davidson, Cassel and Heckscher changed their appreciation of Keynes in the 1930s with the publication of the General Theory while Ohlin viewed the message of Keynes in the 1930s as consistent with the policy views of the Stockholm school of economics.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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