Keynes’s vision of inequality (and why it matters)

This article challenges the prevailing view that John Maynard Keynes ignored income distribution in his economic thinking. While scholars such as Branko Milanovic argue that Keynes lacked an ‘integrative vision’ of inequality, a closer reading reveals that distributional concerns are woven throughout his work—from The Economic Consequences of the Peace to How to Pay for the War. Though Keynes never developed a full theory of distribution like Michał Kalecki, he embedded inequality into key parameters of his macroeconomic analysis, particularly in relation to effective demand, wage policy, full employment and the burdens of war. I argue that Keynes’s evolving engagement with a ‘functional theory of distribution’—in which inequality is assessed mainly by its effects on the macroeconomy—offers essential insights for current policy challenges. Far from indifferent, Keynes provides a historically grounded and macroeconomically coherent framework for understanding inequality. Revisiting this overlooked dimension of his thought opens the way towards a Keynesian ‘economics of enough’ for today’s ecologically constrained and unequal world.