Topic: What Contribution Did Adam Smith And John M. Keynes Make To The Study Of Economics?

To underscore his laissez-faire convictions, Smith argued that state and personal efforts, to promote social good are ineffectual compared to unbridled market forces.
             Adam Smith explained that a monopoly charges any price that it chooses, robs consumers and makes countries less efficient and poorer. Competition, he said, means that businesses try to charge the lowest price possible, so consumers get maximum value for money. If they can buy more, they support more jobs in the economy and the country grows richer. Without the police stopping competition, he said, monopolies cannot survive for long. Around the world today, government monopolies and other bad practices are under major assault from Adam Smith's ideas.
             Adam Smith believed that strong government was a great necessity, particularly to create and enforce laws and to ensure justice. He believed in a democratic partnership between government and the people, but knew that each should do what it does best - businessmen should not control the justice system, nor should government try to run businesses. Thus he was the real father of privatisation and other 20th century reforms based on market economics under rule of law.
             The heart of Keynesian economics consists of an analysis of the determinants of effective demand. If one ignores foreign trade, effective demand consists essentially of three spending streams: consumption expenditures, investment expenditures, and government expenditures, each of which is independently determined.
             John M. Keynes attempted to show that the level of effective demand so determined may well exceed or fall short of the physical capacity to produce goods and services: that there is no automatic tendency to produce at a level that results in the full employment of all available men and machines. This fundamental implication of the theory came as something of a shock to exponents of the traditional economics who had been inclined to take refuge in the assumption that economic system tend automatically to full employment.