Messrs. K. and H.

 

Messrs. K. and H. assure the public
Their production will be second to none.

 

 I recently quoted Hayek from chapter 7 of The Road to Serfdom (p.92):

What in ordinary language is misleadingly called the "economic motive" means merely the desire for general opportunity, the desire for power to achieve unspecified ends.

The quote reminds me of something Keynes said in Chapter 16 of his 1936 book, about accumulating for an "unspecified" purpose being the problem:

The trouble arises, therefore, because the act of saving implies ... a desire for 'wealth' as such, that is for a potentiality of consuming an unspecified article at an unspecified time.

Maybe that sounds a little weird. But K is not saying that saving is always bad. He is saying there is no direct connection between saving and investment, and people often save with no productive investment in mind, and this can lead to an imbalance that is bad for the economy. That's what I hear him saying.

It has to do with inequality, I think: big income, big saving, big problem. Hayek didn't mention this problem. It wasn't a problem when he wrote the Serfdom book in 1944. But it was a problem in 1936 when Keynes wrote, and it is a problem again today.