Читать книгу Milton Friedman - Eamonn Butler - Страница 20

Friedman’s work on consumer behaviour at the National Resources Committee 20 years earlier gave him more facts to back up his thinking. It also enabled him to demolish another key part of Keynes’s economic structure, one that had encouraged governments to expand in size and to raise taxes.

Keynes thought that as we grow wealthier, we tend to spend less and save more. With less being spent on goods and services, production would decline and unemployment would rise. That argued for high taxes to limit people’s incomes, and for higher government spending to fill the spending gap.

But in The Theory of the Consumption Function, published in 1957, Friedman showed that people who have different levels of lifetime income actually have remarkably consistent spending and saving habits. Keynes was simply wrong about the facts of human behaviour, and consequently had greatly overstated the need for government spending and taxation.