Labor Market Coordination and Monetary Equilibrium: W H. Hutt's Place in "Pre-Keynesian" Macro

Two major themes pervade the outstanding contributions of W H. Hutt. The first is his attempt to clarify and advance our understanding of the coordination process of the market, especially the market for labor, and the second is his career-long critique of the Keynesian theoretical framework. It becomes quickly obvious from reading almost any of his books, and many of his articles, that those two themes were very tightly linked in Hutt's mind. It is fair to say that although his critiques of Keynes are both broad and deep, they rest fundamentally on the view of the labor market he first sketched out in The Theoiy of Idle Resources in 1939. Having clarified the nature of idleness, Hutt proceeded to show the problems which would result if inflation, rather than the "natural" price coordination process, was used to reduce the existing level of idleness, particularly in labor. Thus, Hutt's contributions to n~acroeconomics explore the intersection between monetary phenomena, such as inflation and deflation, and the microeconomic coordination process of the labor market.