I... set forth and illustrate a general framework for monetary analysis. It is not... new... but... shared... in spirit with many monetary economists… - James Tobin

The general accounting framework for... the capital account... Rows represent assets or debts. ...Columns represent sectors of the economy ...Entries in cells ...can be postive, negative, or zero. A negative entry means... the sector... is a debtor in the... asset indicated by the row. ...The sum across the row is the net exogenous supply of the asset to the economy ...For stocks of goods, this ...is the economy's inheritance from the past. For internally generated financial assets the net... supply... is zero. If from the sums in the final column the... government's holdings of an asset are subtracted (or its debt added), the net holdings of the private economy result. The sum of a column represents the net worth of a sector. The sum of the final column is the national wealth. ...[P]rivate wealth differs from this total by the amount of the government's net worth. If government is a net debtor... if its stocks of goods are ignored, then private wealth exceeds national wealth.

With the publication of J. M. Keynes’s General Theory in 1936 and the mathematical formalizations of his theory by J. R. Hicks (1937) and others, the language of macro-economic theory became systems of simultaneous equations. These are general equilibrium systems of interdependence in the sense that the relationships describe an entire national economy, not just a particular industry or sector. The systems are usually not completely closed; they depend on exogenous parameters including instruments controlled by policy-makers. Seeking definite relationships of economic outcomes to policies and other exogenous variables, qualitative and quantitative, these models sacrifice detail and generality, limiting the number of variables and equations by aggregations over agents, commodities, assets, and time.

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.