In the Keynes article in our book, I understood the main points of the article to be about the consequences of the change in the value of money upon the investing class, the business class, the earner and production. The main points were all related back to one another throughout the article, thus creating cohesiveness and helping to prove his thesis. One example of this was when Keynes related production to the business class by saying that because of production costs and the unreliability of making a profit, an entrepreneur may be hesitant to start a new business venture. The overall thesis was that there should be a way to regulate the level of prices in order to prevent inflation and deflation.
Overall, I found the article to be somewhat confusing because I am not familiar with the subject matter and because the word choice and sentence structure were difficult to follow. Despite this, Keynes ideas in this article seemed to really relate to social problems that many of us are experiencing today due to finances. One of the first things that seemed to relate to how life is now is the section about investing. Keynes said that when investing was first getting started, everybody wanted to invest their money because of the ease and convenience of it, which caused most people to overlook the importance of the stability of money involved. Another example of the importance of the stability of money was in production. When businesses anticipated rising prices, they would slow down the production of a product and then eventually they expect the prices to fall. All of these things seemed to still ring true today. Today, investing money seems like the smart thing to do, but many do not think about what will happen to the value of money during the years that their money is invested. One example in my own life of the changing value of money is my parents’ conversations about our home. When they bought our house about seventeen years ago, it was only worth about $115,000, but now it is worth about $250,000 to $300,000. This is obviously a good deal for my parents, but not for the people that wish to buy our house. A new couple wishing to buy a house has enough financial burdens, but now that housing is getting more and more expensive, it only adds to the strain. For me, this was a very easy example to understand concerning the change in the value of money. One other thing that I found relevant to Keynes article was minimum wage going up recently. Pretty much as soon as minimum wage went up, things started changing such as dollar menus, drink sizes and prices. All of these things are just small examples in probably most of our lives, of the constantly changing value of money. This just leads me to wonder what will happen in the future when we need to buy houses as adults, or have kids working for minimum wage or even send our kids to college!? By then, will things cost a fortune or will things have evened back out like Keynes hoped?
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I really liked your point about the minimum wage and changing prices in todays society. I knew a lot of people who were excited minimum wage was going up, however, I knew that the prices of products were going up just as well. Therefore, even though people are making more money its not going to help them be able to afford more then what they already can.
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