Looking Ahead: The Future Of Post Keynesian Economics

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of the capitalist system and to develop a practical understanding of how to deal with economic problems in the present-day world. The second is that the future is uncertain and the past is immutable.
From Chapter 12 of Keynes's General Theory, situations of uncertainty cannot be adequately modeled in terms of probability distributions and because of this a difference needs to be made between uncertainty and risk where uncertainty is the general case and risk the particular. The real world economic system that entrepreneurs and consumers face is not a system that can be statistically controlled by probability theory or predicted by future outcomes of variables determined by some present value formula. Recognizing the importance of non-probabilistic uncertainty in economic decision making also brings up the importance of looking at the economy as moving through historical time which is the third feature. Rather than looking at time as a symmetric variable where in the ...

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is never neutral except under unusual circumstances.
These features can be found throughout Keynes' writings and gave him insights and a vision which looked at the economic problem as not simply being the question of how to allocate scarce resources efficiently in a predictable and certain world. Keynes saw the economic problem more in the context of a social, institutional and political setting in a world that is uncertain. This comes clear in such passages as this one from the End of Laissez-Faire:
Many of the greatest economic evils of our time are the
fruits of risk, uncertainty, and ignorance. It is because
particular individuals, fortunate in situation or in
...

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