THE MEANS TO PROSPERITY de KEYNES, John Maynard - 1933

London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1933. First edition. Very good. Octavo, original blue-green card wrappers. 37,[3]pp. Text followed by publisher's three pages advertising previous and newly published titles by Keynes. Wraps sunned along edges, slight bump at bottom fore-edge; internally clean and bright with neither foxing nor annotations. Very good.

First edition of the enlarged version of four of Keynes' articles printed in the [London] Times during March 1933, making his case for counter-cyclical public spending, never a welcome economic relief plan to conservative leaders of any administration in that time or in the present. At the height of the Great Depression, in 1933, Keynes published The Means to Prosperity, which contained specific policy recommendations for tackling unemployment in a global recession, chiefly the aforementioned counter-cyclical public spending. Keynes' advised government to take on debt in order to spend money on relief to individual citizens thereby elevating their quality of life rather than giving tax relief and benefits to business in the hope that the "trickle down effect" would finally reach the intended targets. While it was addressed chiefly to the British Government, it also contained advice for other nations affected by the global recession; a copy was sent to the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other world leaders. At the 1933 London Economic Conference opinions remained too diverse for a unified course of action to be agreed upon.