"By the autumn of 1936 Keynes had reached Harvard with tidal force, There had been no such excitement among the younger economists before; there has been none such since. Here was a solution to depression and unemployment, the most urgent problem of the time. It was also a conservative one. Keynes showed that the government, by offsetting the excess of savings -- the short fall in purchasing power -- could prop up the economy so that it functioned at or near full employment instead of at some painful and socially demoralizing level down below."