I had, to be sure, been drawn into economics when the General Theory was an exciting revelation for students hungry for explanation and remedy of the… - James Tobin

Treatment of the capital account separately from the production and income account of the economy is... a first step, a simplification... justified by convenience... The strategy is to regard income account variables as tentatively exogenous... and to find equilibrium in the markets for stocks of assets conditional upon assumed... outputs, incomes, and other flows.

Keynesian economics at a minimum provides a license for welfare state measures and other government efforts towards redistribution of wealth. The license is the faith that macroeconomic stabilization and prosperity are compatible with a wide range of social policies, that modern capitalism and democracy are robust enough to prosper and progress while being humane and equitable. That faith conflicts with the visions of extreme Right and Left, which agree that extremes of wealth and poverty, of security and insecurity, are indispensable to the functioning of capitalism. Keynesian policies helped to confound those dismal prophecies in the past; I think they will do so again.

The rate of investment – the speed at which investors wish to increase the capital stock – should be related, if to anything, to <math>q</math>, the value of capital relative to its replacement cost.