Suddenly, and somewhat unexpectedly, there seems to be a real chance for change in the way economics is taught in American colleges and universities. During the last two years, three different groups have taken a critical look at economics education and declared that change is in order. The Association of American Colleges (AAC), in conjunction with the American Economic Association (AEA), commissioned a study of the undergraduate economics major which has led to a report with several recommendations for reform (John Siegfried et al. 1991); in response to a National Science Foundation (NSF) symposium that revealed concern over the state of graduate education, the AEA formed the Commission

In his posthumous essay My Early Beliefs John Maynard Keynes outlined his mental in the dozen years before the war and asserted their importance to his later life. Yet, despite Keynes's assertion of the importance of this part of his mental history to who he was and what he did in 1938 (the year the essay was written and two years after he published The General Theory), there is virtually no treatment in the of economic thought of this period of his life or of its impact on his economic theory. The purpose of this essay is to treat an episode of that period of his life which has particular analytical importance and to suggest some ways in which it might contribute to a clearer understanding of his later work in economics. The episode in Keynes's early life which the essay examines is his role in G. E. Moore's changing opinion about the importance of rules in ethics. In his classic Principia Ethica (1903), Moore had originally asserted that obeying certain rules is a necessary part of ethically correct behavior; but in his Ethics (1912) he makes exactly the opposite argument saying that individuals are always justified in judging a case for themselves and are under no obligation to follow general rules of conduct. In the parlance of modern philosophy Moore switched from a rule utilitarian argument to an act utilitarian argument.' The first four sections of the essay detail the role which Keynes played in Moore's change of heart. The final section discusses how the episode affects our understanding of Keynes's work in economics.