Keynes located the problem of simultaneous overproduction and underconsumption at the level of circulation. His solution to the problem consisted of a series of policies designed to stimulate consumption and investment. He alleged that the real world results to be expected were more important than any paper losses that might have to be written off. Unlike Narayan’s solution of the same date, Keynes’ solution did not call for a change in the ownership of the means of production. Like Nehru, Keynes did not have the luxury of protecting himself from empirical refutation by clinging to a counterfactual argument that the world would have been better if his ideas had been applied, because to a large extent his ideas were applied. They were orthodox from the mid 1930s to the mid 1960s. Allthough some, like Gunnar Myrdal thought that “the Keynesian revolution” had changed economics forever, the general consensus is that mainstream economics has now reverted to something very like pre-Keynesian economics. The age of Keynes is over. (6B) On a practical level, managing national economies with the tools of macroeconomics has proven to be impossible in the era of globalization, leaving in the lurch social democrats who used to favor Keynesian policies to bring about full employment, equity, and inclusion of the marginalized. (6C) A.M. Huq is one of those who has pointed out that Gandhi had a better analysis than Keynesian ideas provides with respect to India’s basic problem of massive rural poverty: “…he [Gandhi] had a better perception of the nature of massive rural unemployment than he is given credit for. That type of unemployment is structural, seasonal, and technological, rather than cyclical. Deficiency of aggregate demand has very little to do with that type of unemployment.” (6D)

Gandhi’s thought suggests an explanation of simultaneous overproduction and underconsumption that is in principle different from those discussed so far, and also different from the explanation of unemployment Narayan attributed to Gandhi when he associated him with the view that unemployment is caused by machines. The explanation is that modern society is adharma. This comprehensive and somewhat flexible word, rich in connotations, can serve as an emblem of several aspects of Gandhi’s thought and practice, which suggest creative ways to think about the problems Narayan posed in 1936 when he asked, “Can there be anything more contradictory than this ?”

Gandhi questions the constitutive principles of economic science laid down by Adam Smith, when he attributed the origins of its subject matter to the human propensity to truck or barter: “Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want.” Gandhi questions Smith’s confidence that he can find security in relying on the self-interest of the butcher, the brewer, and the baker to bring him his dinner. Much historical evidence shows that indeed Smith’s confidence in the efficacy of self-interest is not a principle of general validity. In the depression of the 1930s it was in the self-interest of employers to lay off their employees. It was in the self-interest of bankers to foreclose on people’s houses and farms. In Argentina in 2001 it was in the self-interest of entrepreneurs to abandon their enterprises, leaving the workers without work, the government without taxes, and consumers without products. One might regard such well known and frequently occurring situations where self-interest does not function to meet human needs as bugs in the system that can be corrected by redesigning institutions to harness self-interest more effectively. Or, like Gandhi, one might consider another alternative: that people ought, in principle and as a matter of duty, make themselves useful to their fellow human beings, and, indeed, to all life.