William Hutt wrote The Theory of Idle Resources (Hutt, 1939 [1977]) out of a profound dissatisfaction with Keynes’s treatment of it in the General Theory (Keynes, 1936), In particular, Hutt was disturbed by Keynes’s notion of “involuntary” unemployment” and sought to provide a better, more comprehensive analysis of the existence of and changes in the intensity of current use of not only labor, but of resources in general, in effect arguing that resources have many, varied and qualitatively different, uses, of which “employment” in current production is only one such use. Context matters a lot. Accordingly, there are many types or categories of so-called “idleness” and different categories have different causes, significance and policy implications. So, he provided an intricate analysis of each type of idleness he could think of. In this essay i provide at least one possible unified perspective on the nature, causes and policy implications of what Hutt saw as different categories of idleness. I perceive an implicit economics in this work, one that anticipates some important later contributions.
