The opening sentence of Money, Interest, and Prices, has attracted the attention of most scholars who wrote about Don Patinkin's works in recent years. As shown by Boianovsky (2006), Merhling (2002) or Rubin (2002a), reading Patinkin's doctoral dissertation shed new light on his major work. However, these articles contain only partial presentations of the thesis. This essay contributes to fill in this gap. It offers a detailed presentation of the second part of Patinkin's Ph.D dissertation and claims that this document foreshadowed the research programs of disequilibrium theorists of the 1970's. "On the consistency of economic models: a theory of involuntary unemployment", the text submitted to a committee composed of Gregg Lewis, Paul Douglas, Theodore O. Yntema and chaired by Jacob Marschak in August 1947, was composed of two parts. The first part analyzed how various general equilibrium models failed to incorporate money in a consistent manner. As indicated by the general title, the second part of the thesis, on involuntaryunemployment, seemed the most important to the young economist. Actually, the two parts were written in reverse order. Patinkin started from the idea of explaining unemployment as the consequence of an "inconsistency" of the classical system (Patinkin, 1995, 379). But in a second phase, probably under the influence of the members of the Cowles Commission (Mehrling, 2002), he undertook to develop Lange's criticism of the traditional dichotomy of general equilibrium theory between the determination of relative prices and the determination of money prices.
This paper explains the reasons that led Don Patinkin to interpret the Keynesian theory in a disequilibrium perspective. We claim that the author adopted this position because he believed that the assumption of wage rigidity misrepresented the concept of involuntary unemployment and that, consequently, it had to be rejected. It is shown that this conclusion resulted from the confrontation of Patinkin, during the writing of his Ph.D. thesis, with the interpretations of the Keynesian theory argued respectively by Lange, Klein and Modigliani.Patinkin, Disequilibrium, Neoclassical Synthesis, Macroeconomics, Wage Rigidity,
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