it's interesting, Pound's economics taken seriously here by two eminent -
and eminently mainstream (Desai is a Lord) - economists.
The FT review gives a few clear outlines of the book's arguments
"Pound’s guiding star was Major C.H. Douglas, who believed that he had found
a fatal flaw which doomed any market system to permanent underproduction
through lack of purchasing power, but which could be repaired by the issue
of “social credits”. Pound’s own emphasis was on the iniquity of interest,
just as the Bible and the Koran condemned interest as “usury”. His venom was
directed mainly against bankers and Jews whom he regarded as basically
identical."
"Desai establishes that there was no necessary connection between Pound’s
fascism or anti-Semitism and his economic heresies and, indeed, that the
danger of underproduction could be solved in a democratic community. Desai
explains that the apparent mystery of effective demand, ie the question of
whether spending will be sufficient, was solved by 1936 when Keynes’s
General Theory, with its doctrine of excessive saving - ie under-spending -
appeared."
which interested me as I've been in a very Keynes mood recently. Going the
other way round, Keynes writes briefly about poetry near the end of the
General Theory, but it's on the fallacy of saving or under-consumption in
Mandeville's satire The Grumbling Hive...
Best,
Edmund
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