What happens in recessions? A value-theoretic approach to Liquidity Preference

This paper develops the paper entitled ‘‘Time, the Value of Money and the Quantification of Value’ which was presented at the conference of the Middle East Technical University in September 1998. It presents the case for a value-theoretic treatment of liquidity preference in axiomatic form, based on a temporal analysis. It discusses why temporal analysis is universally excluded from economic discourse. It argues that economic thought is divided not by the schism between classical and marginal, but the chasm between time and equilibrium. This divide is found in more or less every branch and every period in the history of economic thought; the classical variant of equilibrium appeared as Say’s Law, while the Austrians tried to become the temporal variant of marginalism. It suggests that the ‘Weintraub-Davidson-Eichner’ project is an attempt to identify what ‘temporalist’ approaches have in common. It argues there is a new element to this project, namely the growing body of evidence that Marx, too, was a temporalist, and that the temporal interpretation of Marx has more in common with Post-Keynesianism than it has with the rest of Marxism.