Nicholas Johannsen

Nicholas August Ludwig Jacob Johannsen (* 1844 in Berlin ; † November 15, 1928 in Staten Island , New York City ) was a businessman and author of economic and monetary theoretical writings. He is considered an important precursor of Keynesianism .

Life

Knowledge of Johannsen's life is very limited. Born in Germany, he visited the USA several times and emigrated there. At the turn of the century he was employed in the import-export business in New York City and must have continued to visit Germany. There is so far no evidence that he later worked as a self-employed businessman, as he himself claimed.

Johannsen, described by John Maynard Keynes in his Treatise on Money as an amateur economist, sought recognition, criticism or at least a fair discussion of his theses throughout his life, but was largely ignored by academic economics. It was not until the dogma-historical analysis of Keynesianism that it found its way into academic research as an important precursor.

Services

After the American dogma historian Joseph Dorfman, Johannsen made a significant contribution to the theory of depression with his work; after Christof Rühl he is unanimously regarded as one of the most important precursors of John Maynard Keynes ' The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money . Johannsen argued that in contrast to normal saving, which would find its way back in the form of investments in the productive economic cycle, impaired forms of saving would lead to a decline in demand and, as a result, to unemployment and a recession . While normal saving produces new capital goods, the impaired form of saving is the purchase of existing capital goods, such as land or financial stocks. This reduces employment in companies that produce new capital goods, which has a multiplicative effect. Johannsen is therefore considered to be the real inventor of the economic multiplier .

Independently of Silvio Gesell , Johannsen suggested taxing money as a countermeasure. While other taxes would lead to a decline in demand and thus tend towards a recession , this tax stimulates consumption. However, he admitted to Gesell that he had published the idea for circulating money before him.

Fonts

• Cheap Capital , published under A. Merwin (1878)
• Depression periods , brochure published under JJO Lahne (1903)
• A Neglected Point in Connection With Crises , main work published under N. Johannsen (1908) republished in 1971 including a foreword by Josef Dorfman in the Reprints of Economic Classics Series
• How to Relieve the Depression in Journal of Commerce (1908)
• The Tax of the Future (1913)
• Business Depressions (1925)

literature

• Josef Dorfman: Nicholas August Ludwig Jacob Johannsen. The "Amateur Economist". In: The Economic Mind in American Civilization. Volume 5: 1946-1959.
• Christof Rühl: Nicholas August Ludwig Jacob Johannsen . In: Philip Arestis , Malcolm C. Sawyer (Eds.): A Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists. 1992, ISBN 1-85898-560-9 , pp. 327-335.