Maynard Keynes Making Fun Of The Austrian School

This is for my commonplace book.

"It is true that some lengthy or roundabout processes are physically efficient. But so are some short processes. Lengthy processes are not physically efficient because they are long. Some, probably most, lengthy processes would be physically very inefficient, for there are such things as spoiling or wasting with time. With a given labour force there is a definite limit to the quantity of labour embodied in roundabout processes which can be used to advantage. Apart from other considerations, there must be a due proportion between the amount of labour employed in making machines and the amount which will be employed in using them. The ultimate quantity of value will not increase indefinitely, relatively to the quantity of labour employed, as the processes adopted become more and more roundabout, even if their physical efficiency is still increasing. Only if the desire to postpone consumption were strong enough to produce a situation in which full employment required a volume of investment so great as to involve a negative marginal efficiency of capital, would a process become advantageous merely because it was lengthy; in which event we should employ physically inefficient processes, provided they were sufficiently lengthy for the gain from postponement to outweigh their inefficiency. We should in fact have a situation in which short processes would have to be kept sufficiently scarce for their physical efficiency to outweigh the disadvantage of the early delivery of their product. A correct theory, therefore, must be reversible so as to be able to cover the cases of the marginal efficiency of capital corresponding either to a positive or to a negative rate of interest; and it is, I think, only the scarcity theory outlined above which is capable of this.

Moreover there are all sorts of reasons why various kinds of services and facilities are scarce and therefore expensive relatively to the quantity of labour involved. For example, smelly processes command a higher reward, because people will not undertake them otherwise. So do risky processes. But we do not devise a productivity theory of smelly or risky processes as such. In short, not all labour is accomplished in equally agreeable attendant circumstances; and conditions of equilibrium require that articles produced in less agreeable attendant circumstances (characterised by smelliness, risk or the lapse of time) must be kept sufficiently scarce to command a higher price. But if the lapse of time becomes an agreeable attendant circumstance, which is a quite possible case and already holds for many individuals, then, as I have said above, it is the short processes which must be kept sufficiently scarce." -- John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Chapter 16.

Before this quotation, Keynes notes that when people save, they do not put in future orders for specific capital goods. Savers want general power over wealth. Keynes is correct about this. Nevertheless, I can see how some might say capital theory has something to do intertemporal coordination of plans. Yet the Austrian school is mistaken about how they associate greater capital with more lengthy investments, in some sense.