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This paper aims to provide a detailed analysis of the issues related to full employment versus unemployment.Keynes wrote in an era marked by mass unemployment, degradation, and suffering on an incredible scale.A reasonable person could have argued for the failure of capitalism, reaching the conclusion that only major institutional changes-perhaps the nationalization of the means of production-could restore economic health.In fact, many economists came to this conclusion:a large number of British and American intellectuals, who had no particular antipathy toward markets and private property, became socialists during the years of the economic depression, simply because they saw no other way to overcome the massive failures of capitalism.However, Keynes argued that these breakdowns had limited technical causes.We are faced with a technical problem,he wrote in 1930, at a time when people were sinking into recession.And because J.M. Keynes saw the causes of mass unemployment as technical and limited, he argued that the key problem could also be limited and technical: the system will need a new alternator,but the whole machine does not need to be replaced .While many of his contemporaries wanted the government to take over the entire economy,Keynes maintained that far less intrusive policies could secure adequate effective demand, allowing the market economy to function as before
Published in: SWS International Scientific Conference on Social Sciences
Volume 12, pp. 169-182