Review of M. De Vroey, Involuntary Unemployment: The Elusive Quest for a Theory

In the search for the true aim of this book I have come up with two interpretations. The first is that its purpose is to e´pater le Keynesiens, i.e. to argue that they do not need their main tenet, namely, the concept of involuntary unemployment. If taken within the context of their other premises, so De Vroey’s argument goes, it is theoretically ill-founded and, for policy purposes, useless. However, throughout the book, criticism often and easily shifts from the Keynesians to Keynes’s logic, with abundance of bold assertions; see for instance (dipping into it randomly): ‘no valid explanation of involuntary unemployment remains after Keynes’s reasoning errors have been straightened out’; ‘Keynes failed in demonstrating involuntary unemployment’, ‘we do not necessarily need the involuntary unemployment concept’ and so on.