Economic Thought in the 1930s: The Prelude to Keynesianism

Abstract

ECONOMICS IN CANADA came of age in the •93os. • A discipline that had only recently become an established part of the university curriculum in Canada began, under the stimulus of the worst depression in Canadian history, to challenge traditional descriptions of the way in which the economy worked. As it did so it increasingly undermined the theories on which those descriptions were based and began in a serious fashion to search for a new approach to economics. By the time that English economist John Maynard Keynes published his famous General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in •936, Canadian economists were more than ready to abandon an obsolete view of the economic universe in favour of a structure that offered greater hope for comprehension of the world around them. A change in theory was accompanied and its impact accelerated by a changing role for professional economists. To an unprecedented degree the Depression caused the public to look to economists for advice on public policy. This change was the result of a conjuncture of circumstances including the relatively improved state of economics departments in Canadian universities in the years after World War •, theoretical developments at the national and international evels, and, most importantly, the quest for a solution to the worst economic risis in Canadian history. Together these factors catapulted the 'dismal science' into a prominent role in Canadian governmental planning and reform. Thus, for example, in •93 the Canadian civil service had only one civil servant with graduate training in economics, O.D. Skelton,

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