50 SOCIAL SCIENTIST the firms taken together is an underemployment equilibrium which not only fetches lower profits for each firm (and for all of them taken together) than was potentially possible., but which represents a distinctly "inferior" equilibrium on any criterion (and notably in the sense that a non-zero-sum move to another equilibrium is possible). Let us look at the matter a little more closely. In the economy as a whole, ignoring foreign trade for simplicity, the total investment generates an amount of savings equal to itself. In its totality therefore investment is self-financing. But, for any individual production unit, the savings generated by the investment undertaken by it, do not necessarily accrue to itself. Hence while investment in the aggregate is self-financing, the investment undertaken by any particular capitalist is ceteris paribus not self-financing. Any individual unit, deciding, in isolation, on its own individual level of investment, would therefore act as if it faces a budget constraint, which, for all units taken together, does not really exist (we are ignoring for simplicity the distinction between rentiers and entrepreneurs). An individual's investment does not ease his own budget constraint; it eases someone else's. For this very reason however none pushes investment beyond a point, and the economy remains trapped in a sub-optimal underemployment equilibrium. When Janos Kornai, the Hungarian economist, following the lead of Michael Kalecki, characterised "classical capitalism" as a "demand-constrained system", this is precisely what he had in mind. Any system satisfying the following two conditions is likely to be demand-constrained: first, if its overall state is determined as the mere aggregation of individual decisions of micro-units whose budgetary positions are actually inter-dependent; and secondly, if each in isolation faces a "hard budget constraint". Keynes found the "public scandal of wasted resources" that a demand-constrained system entails, "intolerable". He visualised "a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment", though he was quick to add: "It is not the ownership of the instruments of production which it is important for the State to assume. If the State is able to determine the aggregate amount of resources devoted to augmenting the instruments and the basic rate of reward to those who own them, it will have accomplished all that is necessary." This vision clearly entailed a substantial departure from unfette 'ed decentralisation. The question of "ownership" raised by Keynes is important. The question is not merely whether there can be socialisation of investment without socialisation of ownership of the means of production, on