best biography of keynes

Advertisement

Supported by

Books of The Times

John Maynard Keynes Died in 1946. An Outstanding New Biography Shows Him Relevant Still.

By Jennifer Szalai

• May 20, 2020
• Share full article

Do you hear that? It’s the sound of the money printer whirring — trillions of dollars getting pumped into a collapsing economy, making the bailouts following the 2008 financial crisis look like small change .

“The Price of Peace,” Zachary D. Carter’s outstanding new intellectual biography of John Maynard Keynes, offers a resonant guide to our current moment, even if he finished writing it in the time before Covid-19. It’s rare for a 600-page economic history to move swiftly along currents of lucidity and wit, and this happens to be one of them. (Carter pays tribute to Robert Skidelsky’s three-volume biography of Keynes in the acknowledgments.) Carter begins with a love story, and ends with an elegant explanation of a credit default swap; even readers without a background in high finance will learn how to appreciate the drama of both.

Ideas, no matter how abstract, always originate in lived experience. Carter situates the development of Keynes’s economic thought in relation to his social milieu. Keynes, born in 1883, came of age amid the bohemian experimentation of the Bloomsbury Group, exchanging lovers and gossip with a set that included Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. The Bloomsberries could be at turns backbiting, encouraging, critical and adulatory; their “radical and subversive code of conduct,” coupled with a refined taste for the good life, shaped Keynes’s approach to economic questions. He was trained as a mathematician, but unlike more doctrinaire economists, he viewed markets as social phenomena. Those who studied economics, he insisted, should be curious and intellectually nimble, with an abiding interest in human psychology and ethical questions.

Keynes had little trouble changing his mind, and he tended to project that intellectual flexibility onto others, even when they didn’t deserve it. It was a quality that made him hopeful, optimistic and sometimes “dangerously naïve,” Carter writes. At the end of World War I, as an emissary from the British Treasury at the Paris peace conference, he argued vehemently against trying to wrest crippling reparations payments from Germany. His argument was both moral and pragmatic. “If Germany is to be milked,” he patiently explained to his colleagues, “she must not first of all be ruined.”

But Germany was ruined, and Keynes’s fears were borne out. The humiliated German people suffered under austerity conditions demanded by a crushing debt. Demagogues thrived on festering resentments. “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” Keynes’s compact and devastating attack on the Treaty of Versailles, quickly became an international best seller when it was published in 1919, though the full extent of its import and prescience would be revealed only in time. More immediate — and undeniably delicious — was its scathing invective (another Bloomsbury influence). Keynes famously likened President Woodrow Wilson to a “blind and deaf Don Quixote,” and was hardly gentler on his own prime minister. David Lloyd George, Keynes wrote (in lines that were excised from later editions), was a “vampire” who was “rooted in nothing.”

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

• Search Search Please fill out this field.

Education and Early Career

• Advocacy of Government Intervention

What Is Keynesian Economics?

Criticism of keynesian economics.

• John Maynard Keynes FAQs

The Bottom Line

Who was john maynard keynes & what is keynesian economics.

James Chen, CMT is an expert trader, investment adviser, and global market strategist.

John Maynard Keynes was an early 20th-century British economist, best known as the founder of Keynesian economics and the father of modern macroeconomics . One of the hallmarks of Keynesian economics is the idea that governments should actively try to influence the course of economies, especially by increasing spending to stimulate demand in the face of recession .

In his seminal work, "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money"—considered one of the most influential economics books in history—Keynes advocated for government intervention as a solution to high unemployment.

Key Takeaways

• British economist John Maynard Keynes was the founder of Keynesian economics.
• Keynesian economics argues that demand drives supply.
• To create jobs and boost consumer buying power during a recession, Keynes held that governments should increase spending, even if it means going into debt.
• Critics attack Keynesian economics for promoting deficit spending, stifling private investment, and causing inflation.

Investopedia / Julie Bang

Keynes’ early interest in economics was due in large part to his father, John Neville Keynes, an economics lecturer at Cambridge University. His mother, one of Cambridge's first female graduates, was active in charitable work for the underprivileged.

Born into a middle-class family, he received scholarships to two of the most elite schools in England, Eton College and Cambridge University, where he earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics in 1904. He excelled at mathematics throughout his academic career, and notably, he had almost no formal training in economics.

Early in his career, Keynes worked on probability theory and lectured in economics as fellow of King's College at Cambridge University. His government roles ranged from official positions in the British Civil Service and the British Treasury to appointments to royal commissions on currency and finance, including his 1919 appointment as the Treasury’s financial representative at the Versailles peace conference that ended World War I.

Advocacy of Government Intervention in the Economy

Keynes' father was an advocate of laissez-faire economics , an economic philosophy of free-market capitalism that opposes government intervention. Keynes himself was a conventional believer in the principles of the free market (and an active investor in the stock market) during his time at Cambridge.

However, after the 1929 stock market crash triggered the Great Depression , Keynes came to believe that unrestricted free-market capitalism was essentially flawed and needed to be reformulated, not only to function better in its own right but also to outperform competitive systems like communism.

As a result, he began advocating for government intervention to curb unemployment and correct economic recession. In addition to government jobs programs, he argued that increased government spending was necessary to decrease unemployment—even if it meant a budget deficit .

The theories of John Maynard Keynes, known as Keynesian economics , center around the idea that governments should play an active role in their countries' economies, instead of just letting the free market reign. Specifically, Keynes advocated federal spending to mitigate downturns in business cycles.

The most basic principle of Keynesian economics is that demand—not supply—is the driving force of an economy. At the time, conventional economic wisdom held the opposite view: that supply creates demand. Because aggregate demand —the total spending for and consumption of goods and services by the private sector and the government—drives supply, total spending determines all economic outcomes, from the production of goods to the employment rate.

Another basic principle of Keynesian economics is that the best way to pull an economy out of a recession is for the government to increase demand by infusing the economy with capital. In short, consumption (spending) is the key to economic recovery.

These two principles are the basis of Keynes' belief that demand is so important that, even if a government has to go into debt to spend, it should do so. According to Keynes, the government boosting the economy in this way will stimulate consumer demand, which in turn spurs production and ensures full employment.

Although widely adopted after World War II, Keynesian economics has attracted plenty of criticism since the ideas were first introduced in the 1930s.

One major criticism deals with the concept of big government—the expansion of federal initiatives that must occur to enable the government to participate actively in the economy. Rival economic theorists, like those of the Chicago School of Economics , argue that: Economic recessions and booms are part of the natural order of business cycles; direct government intervention only worsens the recovery process; and federal spending discourages private investment.

The most famous critic of Keynesian economics was Milton Friedman , an American economist best known for his advocacy of free-market capitalism. Considered the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century—as Keynes was the most influential economist of the first half—Friedman advocated monetarism , which refuted important parts of Keynesian economics.

Keynes held that fiscal policy —government spending and tax policies to influence economic conditions—is more important than monetary policy —control of the overall supply of money available to banks, consumers, and businesses. In contrast, Friedman and fellow monetarists held that governments could foster economic stability by targeting the growth rate of the money supply. In short, Friedman and monetarist economists advocate the control of money in the economy , while Keynesian economists advocate government expenditure.

For example, while Keynes believed that an interventionist government could moderate recessions by using fiscal policy to prop up aggregate demand, spur consumption, and reduce unemployment, Friedman criticized deficit spending and argued for a return to the free market, including smaller government and deregulation in most areas of the economy, supplemented by a steady increase of the money supply.

Keynesian vs. Laissez-Faire Economics

With its advocacy of government intervention in the economy, Keynesian economics is in sharp contrast to laissez-faire economics , which argues that the less the government is involved in economic affairs, the better for business and society as a whole.

Examples of Keynesian Economics

The new deal.

The onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s significantly influenced Keynes’ economic theories and led to the widespread adoption of several of his policies.

To address the crisis in the U.S., President Franklin Roosevelt enacted the New Deal , a series of government programs that directly reflected the Keynesian principle that even a free-enterprise capitalist system requires some federal oversight.

With the New Deal, the U.S. government intervened to stimulate the national economy on an unprecedented scale, including creating several new agencies focused on providing jobs to unemployed Americans and stabilizing the price of consumer goods. Roosevelt also adopted Keynes' policy of expanded deficit spending to stimulate demand, including programs for public housing, slum clearance, railroad construction, and other massive public works.

 Great Recession Spending

In response to the Great Recession of 2007–2009, President Barack Obama took several steps that reflected Keynesian economic theory. The federal government bailed out debt-ridden companies in several industries. It also took into conservatorship Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac , the two major market makers and guarantors of mortgages and home loans.

In 2009, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act , an $831-billion government stimulus package designed to save existing jobs and create new ones. It included tax cuts/credits and unemployment benefits for families; it also earmarked expenditures for healthcare, infrastructure, and education.

 COVID-19 Stimulus Checks

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, the U.S. government under President Donald Trump and President Joseph Biden offered a variety of relief, loan-forgiveness, and loan-extension programs .

The U.S. government also supplemented weekly state unemployment benefits and sent American taxpayers direct aid in the form of three separate, tax-free stimulus checks.

Since the 1930s, the popularity of Keynesian economics has risen and fallen, and the theories have undergone considerable revision since Keynes' day. However, the economic school of thought he founded has left one indelible stamp on modern nations: the idea that governments have a role to play in business—even in capitalist economies.

Who Said Keynesian Economics Was Spending Your Way out of a Recession?

It was Milton Friedman who attacked the central Keynesian idea that consumption is the key to economic recovery as trying to "spend your way out of a recession." Unlike Keynes, Friedman believed that government spending and racking up debt eventually leads to inflation—a rise in prices that lessens the value of money and wages—which can be disastrous unless accompanied by underlying economic growth. The stagflation of the 1970s was a case in point: It was paradoxically a period with high unemployment and low production, but also high inflation and high-interest rates.

Was Keynes a Socialist?

It is difficult to pigeonhole Keynes as a socialist.

On the one hand, he showed an interest in socialist regimes and advocated the presence of government in economic affairs. He emphatically did not believe in letting business cycles go through boom and bust without intervention—or in letting private enterprise operate unfettered.

On the other hand, Keynes stopped short of advocating that governments actually take over and run industries. He wanted central authorities to stimulate, but not necessarily control, methods of production.

There is also evidence that he was returning to more traditional free-market capitalism towards the end of his life, as he was considering ways to get post-war Britain out of an economic hole. Shortly before his death in 1946, he told his friend, Henry Clay, that he found himself relying more on a solution he had “tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago": Adam Smith’s invisible hand (the natural tendency of a free-market economy to self-correct via the laws of supply and demand ).

What Did Keynes Mean by “In the Long Run, We Are All Dead”?

When critics argued that Keynesian support of public financing and deficit spending would lead to default in the long run, Keynes' famous retort was that “In the long run, we are all dead.” In context, his point was that governments should solve problems in the short run rather than wait for market forces to correct problems over the long run—“when we are all dead.”

Did Keynes Predict the Rise of Nazi Germany?

During the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference, Keynes was an outspoken critic of the crippling economic measures certain senior statesmen wanted to impose on Germany. When his warnings that these harsh sanctions would likely result in economic and political catastrophe for Europe went unheeded, he left the conference early in protest.

As soon as he returned to the U.K., he resigned from the British Treasury and summarized his arguments about the dangers of a peace treaty designed to permanently crush Germany in "The Economic Consequences of the Peace."

Within a year of its publication in 1920, Keynes’ book had become a bestseller that strongly influenced public opinion that the Treaty of Versailles was unfair. As the political and economic turmoil of the 1930s fueled the rise of fascism that exploded into World War II, Keynes’ early warnings began to sound prophetic as well.

John Maynard Keynes and Keynesian economics were revolutionary in the 1930s and did much to shape post-World War II economies in the mid-20th century. His theories came under attack in the 1970s, saw a resurgence in the 2000s, and are still debated today.

A core principle of Keynesian economics is that the best way to pull an economy out of a recession is for the government to increase demand by infusing the economy with capital. In short, consumption are spending are the key to economic recovery.

Just as Keynes was considered the most influential economist of the first half of the 20th century, his most famous critic, Milton Friedman, an advocate of monetarism, was considered the most influential economist of the second half.

Keynes left one significant legacy: the concept that governments have a role to play in the economic well-being of industries and people. The questions that remain are how big the government's role should be and how best to execute that role.

Encyclopedia of Mathematics. “ John Maynard Keynes .”

John Maynard Keynes. "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money." Palgrave Macmillan, 1936.

The Nobel Foundation. “ Nobel Memorial Lecture-Inflation and Unemployment ,” Page 8.

U.S. Department of State-Office of the Historian. “ Biographies of the Secretaries of State-Henry Clay (1777–1852) .”

Maynardkeynes.org. “ After the War (The World Bank, the IMF, and the End) 1945 to 1946 .”

The American Economist. “ Examining…Keynes’s Most Popular Statements…In The Long Run We Are All Dead ,” See Abstract.

University of Cambridge, Marshall Library. “ The Economic Consequences of the Peace, by John Maynard Keynes, 1919 .”

• Terms of Service
• Editorial Policy
• Privacy Policy

• NONFICTION BOOKS
• BEST NONFICTION 2023
• BEST NONFICTION 2024
• Historical Biographies
• The Best Memoirs and Autobiographies
• Philosophical Biographies
• World War 2
• World History
• American History
• British History
• Chinese History
• Russian History
• Ancient History (up to c. 500 AD)
• Medieval History (500-1400)
• Military History
• Art History
• Travel Books
• Ancient Philosophy
• Contemporary Philosophy
• Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Great Philosophers
• Social & Political Philosophy
• Classical Studies
• New Science Books
• Maths & Statistics
• Popular Science
• Physics Books
• Climate Change Books
• How to Write
• English Grammar & Usage
• Books for Learning Languages
• Linguistics
• Political Ideologies
• Foreign Policy & International Relations
• American Politics
• British Politics
• Religious History Books
• Mental Health
• Neuroscience
• Child Psychology
• Film & Cinema
• Opera & Classical Music
• Behavioural Economics
• Development Economics
• Economic History
• Financial Crisis
• World Economies
• Investing Books
• Artificial Intelligence/AI Books
• Data Science Books
• Sex & Sexuality
• Death & Dying
• Food & Cooking
• Sports, Games & Hobbies
• FICTION BOOKS
• BEST NOVELS 2024
• BEST FICTION 2023
• New Literary Fiction
• World Literature
• Literary Criticism
• Literary Figures
• Classic English Literature
• American Literature
• Comics & Graphic Novels
• Fairy Tales & Mythology
• Historical Fiction
• Crime Novels
• Science Fiction
• Short Stories
• South Africa
• United States
• Arctic & Antarctica
• Afghanistan
• Myanmar (Formerly Burma)
• Netherlands
• Kids Recommend Books for Kids
• High School Teachers Recommendations
• Prizewinning Kids' Books
• Popular Series Books for Kids
• BEST BOOKS FOR KIDS (ALL AGES)
• Ages Baby-2
• Books for Teens and Young Adults
• THE BEST SCIENCE BOOKS FOR KIDS
• BEST KIDS' BOOKS OF 2024
• BEST BOOKS FOR TEENS OF 2024
• Best Audiobooks for Kids
• Environment
• Best Books for Teens of 2024
• Best Kids' Books of 2024
• Mystery & Crime
• Travel Writing
• New History Books
• New Historical Fiction
• New Biography
• New Memoirs
• New World Literature
• New Economics Books
• New Climate Books
• New Math Books
• New Philosophy Books
• New Psychology Books
• New Physics Books
• THE BEST AUDIOBOOKS
• Actors Read Great Books
• Books Narrated by Their Authors
• Best Audiobook Thrillers
• Best History Audiobooks
• Nobel Literature Prize
• Booker Prize (fiction)
• Baillie Gifford Prize (nonfiction)
• Financial Times (nonfiction)
• Wolfson Prize (history)
• Royal Society (science)
• Pushkin House Prize (Russia)
• Walter Scott Prize (historical fiction)
• Arthur C Clarke Prize (sci fi)
• The Hugos (sci fi & fantasy)
• Audie Awards (audiobooks)

Books by John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes was one of the most important economists of all time. Here, we’ve listed all the books by John Maynard Keynes that have been recommended by experts on Five Books. If you’re after books about Keynes, we asked Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky to recommend the best books about John Maynard Keynes .

The Economic Consequences of the Peace

By john maynard keynes.

Read expert recommendations

“It’s among the dozen—perhaps half-dozen—most influential economics books that have ever been written. From an economic point of view, it highlighted the importance of the transfer problem—the fact that when you force a country to pay resources, it not only loses those resources but, because it has to sell more, it puts its goods on sale, which is further impoverishing. And it established a model that no economist has subsequently lived up to, the model of an economist as both an analyst and an extraordinary polemicist.” Read more...

The best books on Globalization

Larry Summers , Economist

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

“It is a difficult book, because it’s the first book that tries to figure this stuff out. You don’t teach Keynesian economics from Keynes anymore. Keynes was actually working on The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money before the Great Depression, but, obviously, the Great Depression gave it urgency. It’s a first stab – it’s one hell of a first stab – but because it is a first stab, it’s got all the awkwardnesses that go with that. He goes off on tangents that seemed important to him at the time, but don’t seem so important now. It’s not an easy read.” Read more...

Books that Inspired a Liberal Economist

Paul Krugman , Economist

Essays in Persuasion

“As Keynes anticipated, we have come very close to solving the traditional economic problem, the struggle for subsistence that preoccupied humankind for so long. This piece of prescience is, in part, what makes his essay so engaging. But there is also an error of judgement that runs through Keynes’ essay. He was right that, in theory, we would come very close to solving that fundamental economic problem—that the economic pie would be large enough for everyone to live on.” Read more...

The Best Books on the Future of Work

Daniel Susskind , Economist

A Tract on Monetary Reform

“The reason why I cite Keynes’s earlier Tract on Monetary Reform is that Keynes was a very astute commentator on monetary policy as well as fiscal policy. I would ask the people who call themselves Keynesians to read Keynes. Or read, for example, the last volume of Robert Skidelsky’s wonderful biography. I’ve long revered Keynes’s intellect. I spent much of my time as a graduate student in an argument with him about German hyperinflation. That argument seems to me still to be relevant today, and one that people who quote him seem to have forgotten.” Read more...

Niall Ferguson on His Intellectual Influences

Niall Ferguson , Historian

Interviews where books by John Maynard Keynes were recommended

The wealth of nations by adam smith, a tract on monetary reform by john maynard keynes, the last days of mankind by karl kraus, an autobiography by rg collingwood, war and peace by leo tolstoy.

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson tells us about the diverse influences on his work, from Keynes and Tolstoy to an Austrian satirist. He explains how he prefers a philosophy of history that emphasises the contingent and the chaotic, rather than the neatly predictable.

The Best Books on the Future of Work , recommended by Daniel Susskind

The new division of labor: how computers are creating the next job market by frank levy & richard j murnane, the race between education and technology by claudia goldin and lawrence f katz, essays in persuasion by john maynard keynes, future politics: living together in a world transformed by tech by jamie susskind, marienthal: the sociography of an unemployed community by hans zeisel, marie jahoda & paul f lazarsfeld.

For many us, work is not only a vital source of income, but also an important part of our identity. As computers become ever better at doing jobs that used to be the exclusive preserve of humans, the work available to us and the rewards for doing it will change dramatically. As economist Daniel Susskind explains, these developments are going to force us to rethink how society as a whole works at a very fundamental level, changing the role of the state, the way we think about how individuals contribute to society and how they can, or should, be rewarded.

Books that Inspired a Liberal Economist , recommended by Paul Krugman

Foundation trilogy by isaac asimov, an enquiry concerning human understanding by david hume, the general theory of employment, interest and money by john maynard keynes, essays in economics by james tobin.

Paul Krugman, Nobel prize-winning economist, Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times, and Emeritus Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton, discusses the books that most influenced his formation as a liberal economist.

The best books on Utopia , recommended by John Quiggin

Brave new world by aldous huxley, consider phlebas by iain m banks, the affluent society by john kenneth galbraith, envisioning real utopias by erik olin wright.

Australian economist John Quiggin, author of Zombie Economics,  says we need to inspire people with a view of a better society. In short, we need a new utopia.

The best books on British Democracy , recommended by Peter Kellner

The penguin essays of george orwell by george orwell, the british general election of. . .(nuffield series) by various authors, microcosmographia academica by f m cornford, our nation’s archive by edited by erik bruun and jay crosby.

Political commentator and President of YouGov.com chooses older books from both sides of the Atlantic to show what really matters in politics.

The best books on How the World’s Political Economy Works , recommended by Mark Blyth

The passions and the interests by albert hirschman, the great transformation by karl polanyi, social origins of dictatorship and democracy by barrington moore, the rhetoric of reaction by albert otto hirschman.

If you were the last person alive and had to leave a testament to how our world worked, which five books would you choose? Political economist Mark Blyth makes his ‘desert island’ choices.

The best books on Globalization , recommended by Larry Summers

The economic consequences of the peace by john maynard keynes, manias, panics, and crashes: a history of financial crises by charles kindleberger, globalization and its discontents by joseph e stiglitz, why globalization works by martin wolf, the great convergence by richard baldwin.

Globalization benefits mankind and we are learning how better to deal with the disruption it causes. But one thing is for sure, the laws of economics are no more escapable than the laws of physics. Harvard professor and former US Treasury secretary, Larry Summers, recommends the best books on globalization.

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.

Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases.

© Five Books 2024

• Biographies & Memoirs

Sorry, there was a problem.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the authors

John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman Paperback – Abridged, August 30, 2005

• Print length 1021 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Penguin Books
• Publication date August 30, 2005
• Grade level 12 and up
• Reading age 18 years and up
• Dimensions 5.48 x 1.82 x 8.43 inches
• ISBN-10 9780143036159
• ISBN-13 978-0143036159
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

"The definitive study of the most important economist of his time." — Foreign Affairs

About the Author

Product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0143036157
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books (August 30, 2005)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 1021 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780143036159
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143036159
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
• Grade level ‏ : ‎ 12 and up
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.85 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.48 x 1.82 x 8.43 inches
• #202 in Psychologist Biographies
• #1,270 in Economic History (Books)
• #1,629 in Biographies of Business & Industrial Professionals

About the authors

Robert jacob alexander skidelsky.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Robert Skidelsky

Mark Poffenberger

Customer reviews.

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 67% 12% 6% 9% 5% 67%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 67% 12% 6% 9% 5% 12%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 67% 12% 6% 9% 5% 6%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 67% 12% 6% 9% 5% 9%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 67% 12% 6% 9% 5% 5%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• About Amazon
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell products on Amazon
• Sell on Amazon Business
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Become an Affiliate
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Make Money with Us
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Amazon and COVID-19
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices

• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

• Liberty Fund
• Adam Smith Works
• Law & Liberty
• Browse by Author
• Browse by Topic
• Browse by Date
• Search EconLog
• Latest Episodes
• Browse by Guest
• Browse by Category
• Browse Extras
• Search EconTalk
• Latest Articles
• Liberty Classics
• Search Articles
• Books by Date
• Books by Author
• Search Books
• Browse by Title
• Biographies
• Search Encyclopedia
• #ECONLIBREADS
• College Topics
• High School Topics
• Subscribe to QuickPicks
• Search Guides
• Search Videos
• Library of Law & Liberty
• Home   /  

John Maynard Keynes

S o influential was John Maynard Keynes in the middle third of the twentieth century that an entire school of modern thought bears his name. Many of his ideas were revolutionary; almost all were controversial. Keynesian economics serves as a sort of yardstick that can define virtually all economists who came after him.

Keynes was born in Cambridge and attended King’s College, Cambridge, where he earned his degree in mathematics in 1905. He remained there for another year to study under alfred marshall and arthur pigou , whose scholarship on the quantity theory of money led to Keynes’s Tract on Monetary Reform many years later. After leaving Cambridge, Keynes took a position with the civil service in Britain. While there, he collected the material for his first book in economics, Indian Currency and Finance, in which he described the workings of India’s monetary system. He returned to Cambridge in 1908 as a lecturer, then took a leave of absence to work for the British Treasury. He worked his way up quickly through the bureaucracy and by 1919 was the Treasury’s principal representative at the peace conference at Versailles. He resigned because he thought the Treaty of Versailles was overly burdensome for the Germans.

After resigning, he returned to Cambridge to resume teaching. A prominent journalist and speaker, Keynes was one of the famous Bloomsbury Group of literary greats, which also included Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell. At the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, where the International Monetary Fund was established, Keynes was one of the architects of the postwar system of fixed exchange rates (see Foreign Exchange ). In 1925 he married the Russian ballet dancer Lydia Lopokova. He was made a lord in 1942. Keynes died on April 21, 1946, survived by his father, John Neville Keynes, also a renowned economist in his day.

Keynes became a celebrity before becoming one of the most respected economists of the century when his eloquent book The Economic Consequences of the Peace was published in 1919. Keynes wrote it to object to the punitive reparations payments imposed on Germany by the Allied countries after World War I. The amounts demanded by the Allies were so large, he wrote, that a Germany that tried to pay them would stay perpetually poor and, therefore, politically unstable. We now know that Keynes was right. Besides its excellent economic analysis of reparations, Keynes’s book contains an insightful analysis of the Council of Four (Georges Clemenceau of France, Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain, President Woodrow Wilson of the United States, and Vittorio Orlando of Italy).

Keynes wrote: “The Council of Four paid no attention to these issues [which included making Germany and Austro-Hungary into good neighbors], being preoccupied with others—Clemenceau to crush the economic life of his enemy, Lloyd George to do a deal and bring home something which would pass muster for a week, the President to do nothing that was not just and right” ( chap. 6, para. 2 ).

In the 1920s Keynes was a believer in the quantity theory of money (today called monetarism ). His writings on the topic were essentially built on the principles he had learned from his mentors, Marshall and Pigou. In 1923 he wrote Tract on Monetary Reform, and later he published Treatise on Money, both on monetary policy . His major policy view was that the way to stabilize the economy is to stabilize the price level, and that to do that the government’s central bank must lower interest rates when prices tend to rise and raise them when prices tend to fall.

Keynes’s ideas took a dramatic change, however, as unemployment in Britain dragged on during the interwar period, reaching levels as high as 20 percent. Keynes investigated other causes of Britain’s economic woes, and The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was the result.

Keynes’s General Theory revolutionized the way economists think about economics. It was pathbreaking in several ways, in particular because it introduced the notion of aggregate demand as the sum of consumption, investment , and government spending; and because it showed (or purported to show) that full employment could be maintained only with the help of government spending. Economists still argue about what Keynes thought caused high unemployment. Some think he attributed it to wages that take a long time to fall. But Keynes actually wanted wages not to fall, and in fact advocated in the General Theory that wages be kept stable. A general cut in wages, he argued, would decrease income, consumption, and aggregate demand. This would offset any benefits to output that the lower price of labor might have contributed.

Why shouldn’t government, thought Keynes, fill the shoes of business by investing in public works and hiring the unemployed? The General Theory advocated deficit spending during economic downturns to maintain full employment. Keynes’s conclusion initially met with opposition. At the time, balanced budgets were standard practice with the government. But the idea soon took hold and the U.S. government put people back to work on public works projects. Of course, once policymakers had taken deficit spending to heart, they did not let it go.

Contrary to some of his critics’ assertions, Keynes was a relatively strong advocate of free markets. It was Keynes, not adam smith , who said, “There is no objection to be raised against the classical analysis of the manner in which private self-interest will determine what in particular is produced, in what proportions the factors of production will be combined to produce it, and how the value of the final product will be distributed between them.” 1 Keynes believed that once full employment had been achieved by fiscal policy measures, the market mechanism could then operate freely. “Thus,” continued Keynes, “apart from the necessity of central controls to bring about an adjustment between the propensity to consume and the inducement to invest, there is no more reason to socialise economic life than there was before” (p. 379).

Little of Keynes’s original work survives in modern economic theory. His ideas have been endlessly revised, expanded, and critiqued. Keynesian economics today, while having its roots in The General Theory, is chiefly the product of work by subsequent economists including john hicks , james tobin , paul samuelson , Alan Blinder, robert solow , William Nordhaus, Charles Schultze, walter heller , and arthur okun . The study of econometrics was created, in large part, to empirically explain Keynes’s macroeconomic models. Yet the fact that Keynes is the wellspring for so many outstanding economists is testament to the magnitude and influence of his ideas.

About the Author

David R. Henderson is the editor of  The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics . He is also an emeritus professor of economics with the Naval Postgraduate School and a research fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He earned his Ph.D. in economics at UCLA.

Selected Works

Related entries.

Abba Ptachya Lerner

Lionel Robbins

Joan Violet Robinson

Jean Baptiste-Say

New Keynesian Economics

New Classical Macroeconomics

National Income Accounts

Related Links

Alberto Mingardi, Of Kings, Keynes, and Capitalism , at Econlib. December 7, 2020.

Pedro Schwartz, Gold is Money, In Spite of Mr. Keynes , at Econlib, May 6, 2013.

Pedro Schwartz, Keynes as Lucifer , at Econlib, September 7, 2015.

David Henderson, Economists Waging War , at Econlib, August 3, 2020.

Steve Fazzari on Keynesian Economics , an EconTalk podcast, January 12, 2009.

Steve Fazzari on Stimulus and Keynes , an EconTalk podcast, January 24, 2011.

Nicholas Wapshott on Keynes and Hayek , an EconTalk podcast, October 17, 2011.

Ricardo Reis on Keynes, Macroeconomics, and Monetary Policy , an EconTalk podcast, April 27, 2009.

Benn Steill on The Battle of Bretton Woods , an EconTalk podcast, February 16, 2015.

Larry White on The Clash of Economic Ideas , an EconTalk podcast, May 28, 2012.

Leonidas Zelmanovitz, Vera Smith: The Contrarian View , a Liberty Classic at Econlib, January 7, 2019.

Registration

Biography of John Maynard Keynes

Early life and education, academic and professional career, later life and legacy.

John Maynard Keynes was a British economist and the founder of Keynesianism. His ideas had a profound impact on the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, which in turn influenced the development of fiscal and monetary policies. Keynes made significant contributions to the understanding of the causes of economic cycles. He is considered one of the founders of modern macroeconomics and one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. His teachings laid the foundation for a school of economic thought known as Keynesian economics.

John Maynard Keynes was born on June 5, 1883, in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, in a family belonging to the upper middle class. His father, John Neville Keynes, was a lecturer in economics and philosophy, and his mother, Florence Ada Keynes, became the first female mayor of Cambridge. Keynes won a scholarship to study at Eton College in 1897, where he excelled in subjects such as mathematics and history. In 1902, he went on to King's College, Cambridge. One of his professors, Alfred Marshall, recognized his immense potential and encouraged him to pursue a career in economics.

From 1906 to 1914, Keynes wrote his first book, 'Indian Currency and Finance,' while working in the India Office. After defending his dissertation, which laid the groundwork for his 'A Treatise on Probability,' Keynes became a lecturer at King's College. In the 1930s, Keynes was at the forefront of a revolutionary movement in economic thought. He challenged the traditional ideas of neoclassical economics and argued that insufficient aggregate demand can lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. According to Keynesian economics, the government should intervene in the economy to mitigate the ups and downs of economic activity. Keynes also advocated for the use of fiscal and monetary measures to soften the negative consequences of economic downturns and depressions.

After the outbreak of World War II, Keynes' ideas on economic policy were embraced by leading Western economists. In 1942, he was granted a peerage, becoming Baron Keynes. In 1921, Keynes wrote that he had fallen madly in love with Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova. He claimed that a non-conventional love triangle formed in the early years of their courtship, with the involvement of a young psychologist and writer named Sebastian Sprott. Keynes ultimately chose Lopokova, and they got married in 1925. Although they did not have children, their marriage was a happy one. Keynes passed away from a heart attack on April 21, 1946, at Tilton, Sussex. Lopokova died in 1981.

The influence of Keynes' ideas weakened in the 1970s, partially due to ongoing issues affecting the Anglo-American economy and the criticism from economists like Milton Friedman, who questioned the government's ability to regulate business cycles. However, the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 sparked a renewed interest in Keynesian thought. Keynesian economics provided a theoretical foundation for the economic policies implemented by leaders such as George W. Bush in the United States and Gordon Brown in the United Kingdom in response to the crisis. In 1999, Time magazine included Keynes in its list of the "100 Most Important and Influential People of the 20th Century."

© BIOGRAPHS

Biography Online

John M. Keynes Biography

John M. Keynes (5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946) was one of the most influential economists of the Twentieth Century. His groundbreaking work in the 1930s led to the development of a whole new economic discipline dedicated to macroeconomics. His economic theories, which became known as ‘Keynesianism’ advocated government intervention to end the Great Depression.

During the First World War, Keynes acted as a government advisor for the government. He helped to negotiate terms with Britain’s creditors (UK debt rose sharply in World War One). At the end of the First World War, Keynes took part in the British delegation to the Treaty of Versailles. Keynes was shocked at the level of reparations the Allies wanted to impose on the Germans. Keynes resigned from the British delegation saying it was a recipe for bankrupting Germany. He wrote the Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919, accurately predicting the difficulties Germany would have and the consequent political resentment at such as harsh peace treaty.

“If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp.”

The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)  Chapter VII, Section 1, pg.268

Keynes and the Great Depression

It was the Great Depression of 1929-39, which gave Keynes the opportunity to disparage and challenge the classical orthodoxy which dominated economic theory at the time. At the outbreak of the Great Depression, the classical response was to rely on free markets and balance the budget – through tax increases and cutting government spending. In 1931, Keynes was particularly critical of Ramsay McDonald’s austerity budget which cut public investment, wages and increased taxes. Keynes argued that the government should be doing the opposite. Throughout the 1930s, Keynes was a consistent voice for advocating higher government spending funded through higher borrowing. However, in most democracies, it proved a lone voice – apart from intermittent spending as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The basic principle of Keynes’ work was that in a recession, there were wasted resources due to higher private savings and falling private sector investment and spending. Therefore, the government should intervene. The government should borrow from the surplus savings of the private sector and help unemployed resources, lying idle, to become used. See more at explanation of Keynesian economics

Keynes was also a great publicist for his own views, with a knack for attracting attention. For example, when he saw a waiter with nothing to do, he knocked some serviettes on to the floor. He explained to his bemused friends he was trying to prevent unemployment by creating work. In his General Theory, he used the analogy of digging holes in the ground to explain concepts of aggregate demand.

“ To dig holes in the ground “, paid for out of savings, will increase, not only employment, but the real national dividend of useful goods and services. It is not reasonable, however, that a sensible community should be content to remain dependent on such fortuitous and often wasteful mitigations when once we understand the influences upon which effective demand depends.”

– J.M. Keynes, The General Theory Of Employment, Interest, And Money Ch 4.

His work created some notable soundbites – he popularised the idea of the paradox of thrift (individual saving causes aggregate spending to fall). He also coined the phrase ‘in the long run we are all dead’.

“The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again.”

– J.M. Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923) Ch. 3.

This phrase was an ironic criticism of classical theory, which argued markets would eventually return to equilibrium ‘in the long run.’

His groundbreaking work – The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) provided a framework for macroeconomics and was a radical departure from the more limited classical framework. After the war, to varying degrees, governments in the West pursued Keynesian demand management in an attempt to achieve full employment. This led the US president R. Nixon to declare in the 1960s – “we’re all Keynesians now.”

In the 1970s, the reputation of Keynes’ work was challenged by the stagflation of the decade and the response of neo-classical economists and monetarists, such as Milton Friedman. But, the great recession of 2008-2013, led to a resurgence of interest in Keynes’ explanation for prolonged recessions.

In 1940, his health suffered, and he had to cut back on his workload. However, after the Second World War, he was asked to take part in the British negotiations with America over debt repayments. It was Keynes’ job to emphasise to the Americans how bankrupt the UK was. The American delegation who met Keynes was deeply impressed by his intellect and passion. Though they couldn’t meet his demands until Congress became worried about the spread of Communism in Europe, and agreed to extend the terms of credit.

Outside economics, Keynes was a lover of the arts, opera and noted for his exceptional wit. He was a formidable intellect and even critics admitted he had both great intellect and powers of persuasion.

“Every time I argued with Keynes, I felt that I took my life in my hands and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool.”

– Bertrand Russell

Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek who came up with an economic theory (Austrian economics), very different to Keynes, wrote:

“He was the one really great man I ever knew, and for whom I had unbounded admiration. The world will be a very much poorer place without him.”

Another quality of Keynes was his optimism and belief in finding a solution. While many despaired at the social and economic cost of the Great Depression, to Keynes he saw a way out – it need not be like this.

He used his knowledge of economics to make a fortune on the stock market; though, in 1929, he failed to predict the stock market crash and lost a fortune. However, in the 1930s, he saw his financial investments make a good return, as he made a number of astute investments. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, a fashionable society of Cambridge graduates, who also included Virginia Woolf and E.M.Forster

Keynes married the ballerina Lydia Lopokova but had a number of affairs with both women and men.

He tragically died from a heart attack in 1946, just as he was helping to implement the post-war economic settlement and set up the Bretton-Woods system.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of John M Keynes ”, Oxford, www.biographyonline.net  Published 3 Feb. 2013. Last updated 9 February 2018.

Influence of John M Keynes

• Provided dissenting voice at Treaty of Versailles about the harshness of the peace treaty. Later, many in Britain felt guilt at the terms of Treaty, which justified appeasement.
• Opposition to Gold Standard. In 1931 Britain finally left Gold Standard, which Keynes had criticised for a long time.
• Giving a sense of hope in Great Depression. As Bertrand Russell says in his autobiography: “There are still many people in America who regard depressions as acts of God. I think Keynes proved that the responsibility for these occurrences does not rest with Providence .”
• A sustained attack on orthodox ‘classical economics’. In the 1930s, the UK and US governments didn’t really listen to Keynes, but he did change the study of economics, creating a seismic shift in the subject – which would later incorporate Keynesian ideas into textbooks and economic theory. Joan Robinson said: “ The consequences of Mr. Keynes’s attack upon orthodoxy are very far reaching. First, it cuts the ground from under the pretended justification of inequality, and allows us to see the monstrous absurdity of our social system with a fresh eye.”
• Keynes is credited with the creation of the branch of macro-economics – which up until that point economics was only concerned with micro-economics.
• Keynes helped negotiated credit terms with the US after the war. In 1965, Time Magazine led with a story, quoting Milton Friedman ‘ We’re all Keynesians now’
• A pacifist for much of his life, in 1936, he argued Britain should rearm in face of the Nazi threat.

 What would Keynes do?

• What would Keynes do? – by Tejvan Pettinger. (Note this is the author of Biography Online’s book on Economics.

 Keynes: The Return of the Master

• Keynes: The Return of the Master – by Robert Skidelsky

General Theory

• The General Theory Of Employment, Interest, And Money – John M. Keynes at Amazon

Related pages

• Quotes by Keynes
• Keynesian economics at Economics Help.org

The Universal Man: new John Maynard Keynes biography looks beyond the economics

A new biography of john maynard keynes is right to look beyond the economics he’s chiefly remembered for..

March 26, 2015

• Share on Facebook
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on WhatsApp

The Great Recession has overturned economic theories and their proponents as comprehensively as it has jinxed the world’s money markets. Commentators, academics and authors all puzzled by the failure of current economic models to predict the crisis of 2008 have looked back to the Great Depression to find answers. With the death of the global free market, one man’s reputation for sound thinking has been resurrected, that of the British economist John Maynard Keynes.

Keynes’s path-breaking economic theories made him almost a household name during the ­interwar years. He formulated them at a time of massive unemployment, overturning received wisdom about free markets, advocating government stimulus.

Keynes has not lacked for biographers – Robert Skidelsky’s three definitive volumes have taken their place in the canon of great modern biographies. Thus the appearance of Richard Davenport-Hines’s Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes would seem to be something of a puzzle. Does Keynes need another biographical write-up? Davenport-Hines does a fine job convincing you he does.

This new book is modest in its aims, but trenchant in its effects. Davenport-Hines conjures the essence of Keynes not by a cradle-to-grave treatment. Instead, he rearranges the components of Keynes’s life into seven categories. There are chapters on Keynes as the altruist, boy prodigy, official, public man, husband and lover, connoisseur and envoy. Davenport-Hines depicts Keynes as a man of multitudes.

The first chapter sets the tone: Davenport-Hines casts Keynes as a crusading optimist who sought to remedy the problems of capitalism and thus allow individuals to flourish. “He seems – more than ever – an inspiring example of an intellectual who was bold in his ideas and unselfish in the ways he put them into action,” Davenport-Hines writes. “If his life has one pre-eminent lesson, based not on wish-washy hopes about human nature but on probabilities for good outcomes, it is that if confronted by conflicting alternatives, when choosing the way forward in practical matters, the sound principle is to take the most generous course.”

Keynes’s genius showed itself at a young age. His economist father and pioneering mother doted on him and encouraged his pursuits at Eton and then King’s College, Cambridge. His university experience would affect him profoundly. It was here he met Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf and other members of the Bloomsbury Group, who formed the Apostles, a secretive club. “The personal importance of individual Apostles, and of the Apostolic circle, to his thinking, choices and actions cannot be overstated,” Davenport-Hines observes.

Under the influence of philosopher G E Moore, Keynes learnt to flout conventions. “We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wisdom, experience and self-control to do so success­fully.” Keynes was nothing if not confident.

Though he’s not an economist, Davenport-Hines proves a fine guide to the development of Keynes’s theories. As a young man, Keynes worked at the India Office, then the Treasury, which brought him to Paris in 1919 as the Allies hammered out the settlement after the First World War. He resigned his position, and had his first brush with fame, upon the publication of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a scathing dissection of Allied aims. Keynes criticised the punitive reparations placed on Germany at Versailles. The behaviour of the politicians at the bargaining table appalled him. It was here that Keynes began to develop a technocratic vision. As Davenport-Hines observes: “Implicitly he proposed technical experts, with economists foremost, as a new brand of world leader, beyond the clutches of traditional party politics, vote-buying and tribal loyalties. ”

Economics can be a notoriously arcane discipline, but Keynes was a superb communicator whose views were published in leading magazines and journals. He opposed socialism and Bolshevism, and promoted Liberal Party policies, though he did not run for office himself. (“Keynes was a patrician in outlook. He suspected that liberty was incompatible with equality, and had a sharp preference for liberty over the chimera of equality,” the author writes of Keynes’s political sensibilities.) He was preoccupied with the failure of government policies that failed to get the economy going. “Negation, restriction, inactivity – these are the government’s watchwords,” Keynes wrote in 1929 ahead of a general election. “Under their leadership we have been forced to button up our waistcoats and compress our lungs. Fears and doubts and hypochondriac precautions are keeping us muffled up indoors. But we are not tottering up to our graves. We are healthy children. We need the breath of life.”

Such brash optimism informed Keynes’s economic writings. High unemployment would not simply go away without some kind of government action to stoke consumer demand and encourage investment and employment. It is arguable whether Keynes himself was a “Keynes­ian” – it was for a later generation of economists to extrapolate from The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, his great work of the 1930s. Davenport-Hines devotes only a few pages to this difficult treatise, “one of the most influential works of economic thought, and arguably the most intellectually audacious, ever published”.

But the intent of Universal Man is to show all of Keynes’s facets, not just Keynes the economist. The chapter on Keynes as lover tactfully explores his private life. Though he was essentially homosexual – he had many escapades with men – in 1925 he married the Russian ballet dancer Lydia Lopokova. Their marriage was quite successful, and Keynes was devoted to her. He was also a lover of the arts whose friends included Virginia Woolf and other writers.

Davenport-Hines ably justifies his approach, arguing Keynes’s many sides are complementary: “An abiding concern for him was how civilised people could use their time and abilities well, and fulfil themselves in virtuous, responsible, productive lives. All his intuitions, expertise, priorities and advice revolved around these quandaries. His lives as an economist, as an official, as a pundit, as a lover, as a patron of creativity, as a Londoner and latterly as a country gentleman might seem to be sealed in distant compartments; but they were indivisible in their ethical underpinning.”

The Second World War would see Keynes return as a government envoy. He worked tirelessly to negotiate American loans that buttressed the British war effort. He took his public duties seriously, but his wrangles with American officials proved taxing. He also pondered the shape the postwar world might take. “From the autumn of 1941, Keynes worked at creating a postwar global capitalist economy that avoided the instabilities, fluctuations, excesses and failures of the pre-war system.” Here were the origins of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, institutions that bear Keynes’s imprint. Davenport-Hines movingly writes of this last phase of Keynes’s life – he would die in 1946 – “with altruism in his heart he chose to dissipate the last remnants of his strength in public service”.

What would Keynes make of theories that today bear his name? Impossible to know; but Davenport-Hines notes, “he was after all, both brilliant and brave in having second thoughts. He did not believe in mental standstills”. However much Keynes’s ideas have been refined, revised and criticised by subsequent generations, his ceaseless activity and willingness to think boldly remain an inspiration.

Matthew Price is a regular contributor to The National.

Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.

Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.

“ Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.

Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.

“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.

Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.

From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.

Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.

BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.

Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.

Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.

“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.

Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.

“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.

“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”

COMPANY%20PROFILE

Towering concerns.

Abu Dhabi tower demolition: calls for more clarity on tenant rights

How will Gen Alpha invest?

Mark Chahwan, co-founder and chief executive of robo-advisory firm Sarwa, forecasts that Generation Alpha (born between 2010 and 2024) will start investing in their teenage years and therefore benefit from compound interest.

“Technology and education should be the main drivers to make this happen, whether it’s investing in a few clicks or their schools/parents stepping up their personal finance education skills,” he adds.

Mr Chahwan says younger generations have a higher capacity to take on risk, but for some their appetite can be more cautious because they are investing for the first time. “Schools still do not teach personal finance and stock market investing, so a lot of the learning journey can feel daunting and intimidating,” he says.

He advises millennials to not always start with an aggressive portfolio even if they can afford to take risks. “We always advise to work your way up to your risk capacity, that way you experience volatility and get used to it. Given the higher risk capacity for the younger generations, stocks are a favourite,” says Mr Chahwan.

Highlighting the role technology has played in encouraging millennials and Gen Z to invest, he says: “They were often excluded, but with lower account minimums ... a customer with $1,000 [Dh3,672] in their account has their money working for them just as hard as the portfolio of a high get-worth individual.”

COMPANY%20PROFILE%20

Company%20profile, auron mein kahan dum tha.

Starring: Ajay Devgn, Tabu, Shantanu Maheshwari, Jimmy Shergill, Saiee Manjrekar

Director: Neeraj Pandey

Rating: 2.5/5

Our legal consultant

Name:  Dr Hassan Mohsen Elhais

Position:  legal consultant with Al Rowaad Advocates and Legal Consultants.

Pros%20and%20cons%20of%20BNPL

Beetlejuice beetlejuice.

Starring: Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton, Jenny Ortega

Director: Tim Burton

Rating: 3/5

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center

John Maynard Keynes, Baron Keynes of Tilton summary

John Maynard Keynes, Baron Keynes of Tilton , (born June 5, 1883, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Eng.—died April 21, 1946, Firle, Sussex), British economist, known for his revolutionary theories on the causes of prolonged unemployment. The son of the distinguished economist John Neville Keynes (1852–1949), he served in the British treasury during World War I and attended the Versailles Peace Conference. He resigned in protest over the Treaty of Versailles , denouncing its provisions in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), and he returned to teaching at the University of Cambridge. The international economic crisis of the 1920s and ’30s prompted him to write The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1935–36), the most influential economic treatise of the 20th century. It refuted laissez-faire economic theories, arguing that the treatment for economic depression was either to enlarge private investment or to create public substitutes for private investment. Keynes argued that in mild economic downturns, monetary policy in the form of easier credit and lower interest rates might stimulate investment. More severe crises called for deliberate public deficits ( see deficit financing), either in the shape of public works or subsidies to the poor and unemployed. Keynes’s theories were put into practice by many Western democracies, notably by the U.S. in the New Deal. Interested in the design of new international financial institutions at the end of World War II, Keynes was active at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944.

J.M. Keynes

Introduction

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was the most influential economist of the twentieth century and, after Adam Smith, one of the two most influential economists of the modern age. Two of his books,  The Economic Consequences of the Peace  (1919) and  The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money  (1936), were among the most important books on economics and politics published during the last century.

Keynes was the principal theoretical architect of the post-war economic order in which governments assumed responsibility for stabilizing economies and promoting employment through spending, regulation, and debt. The evolution of “managed economies” in the post-war era owed a great deal to Keynes’s writings in the 1930s, in which he established full employment as the proper goal of economic policy and provided policy-makers with a set of fiscal tools whereby they might try to smooth out the booms and busts of the business cycle. This was the “middle way” that Keynes tried to steer between the extremes of communism and fascism and between state planning and free market capitalism. From a political point of view, Keynes was among the liberal reformers of that era who sought to “tame” capitalism by assigning new managerial duties to national governments.

Keynes was by no means solely an economic theorist, but a thinker with the widest range of interests. Keynes was a political economist in the tradition of Adam Smith , John Stuart Mill, Joseph Schumpeter, and Friedrich Hayek . His work wove together the interconnected subjects of politics and political institutions, culture, history, psychology, and economic theory. Robert Skidelsky, Keynes’s biographer, asserts that he was as much a moralist as an economist. Keynes, he wrote, searched for a vision of capitalism that promoted both efficiency and justice in equal parts. Nor was Keynes an “armchair” or academic theorist: he participated actively in every important political debate that took place in Great Britain during the tumultuous years from the outbreak of World War I through the close of World War II. He believed that progress in economics must arise from the interplay between theory and urgent practical problems.

Keynes was a “liberal revolutionary” whose aim was to place the capitalist order on different economic, political, and cultural foundations than those inherited from the nineteenth century. Keynes was sensitive to the historical nature of the capitalist system as it evolved through different phases, created new institutional forms, and adapted to crises and new challenges. He questioned whether it was still appropriate to use theories formulated in 1800 or 1850 to account for the economic realities of the 1920s and 1930s. He wrote in the 1920s that “the age of  laissez faire ” (as he called it) had been made obsolete first by the development of large corporations and labor unions and then by the destructive effects of the world war. If the old order was dead, then a new one had to be built upon new intellectual foundations. This was the campaign that Keynes engaged in during his interludes of public service and in the books and articles that he wrote between 1919 and his death in 1946.

There are five general subjects that require consideration in regard to Keynes’s life and career: (1)  The Economic Consequences of the Peace ; (2) the evolution of the capitalist order; (3) the Great Depression and  The General Theory ; (4) World War II and the Bretton Woods system; and (5) Keynes’s post-war legacy.

The Economic Consequences of the Peace

For Keynes and his generation, the “great war” of 1914–18 shattered the foundations of European civilization. The old order in Europe was built upon a network of interlocking principles and ideals: Protestantism and Victorian morals in culture; nationalism, empire, and monarchy in politics;  laissez faire , free trade, and the gold standard in economics. The great question after the war was whether the symbols and institutions of the old order could survive in a new era of sovereign debt, despair and dashed hopes, debauched currencies, and a permanently changed balance of world power. Keynes did not think that they could.

Keynes’s reflections on the war and the damage it did to the social order were set out in The Economic Consequences of the Peace , the polemical exposé of the Paris Peace Conference that he wrote in a few months in 1919 after serving as a member of the British delegation to the Conference. Keynes predicted that the Treaty of Versailles, unless revised, would lead to financial ruin across Europe and possibly to a new and even more destructive war. The book was an immediate best seller and it turned Keynes into an international celebrity. It ran through five editions and was translated into eleven languages within a few years.

In Keynes’s view, the war fatally disrupted the delicate balance among the various factors of trade, psychology, population, and investment upon which the pre-war order was constructed, leaving millions on the continent starving and destitute when the war ended. Nearly 40 million people (mostly Europeans) were killed or wounded during the course of the war; factories and transportation grids were destroyed across large swaths of the continent; food and medicine were in short supply; all countries were in debt (mainly to the United States) due to vast borrowings to pay for armaments; national currencies were of uncertain value in relation to one another due to wartime inflation; and the accumulated wealth of the Continent was consumed in a few years of war. The suffering was magnified by comparison with the comfortable lives Europeans enjoyed before 1914 and with the optimistic hopes for the future that nearly everyone had entertained just a few years before.

Most observers, including Keynes, expected the French, British, and American leaders who controlled the Peace Conference to craft a treaty that incorporated President Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Keynes stressed various elements of Wilson’s program that pointed away from a punitive settlement. Nevertheless, after six months of negotiations, running from January to June (1919), the Conference adopted a regime of reparations and territorial concessions designed to punish Germany by making her bear most of the costs of the war. The Treaty assigned to Germany the entire blame for the war, and forced her to disarm and to cede territories and raw materials to France. In addition, the Treaty assessed some $40 billion in reparations against Germany to compensate the victorious powers for war damages, a sum that was about three times Germany’s pre-war GDP.

The Allied leaders adopted this approach in order to reduce German power to a level commensurate with that of France and Great Britain, and thus to restore something resembling the pre-war balance of power among the major European states. Keynes judged this to be a wrongheaded and self-defeating approach. “My purpose in this book,” he wrote, “is to show that the Carthaginian Peace is not practically right or possible. The clock cannot be set back. You cannot restore Central Europe to 1870 without setting up such strains in the European structure and letting loose such human and spiritual forces as will overwhelm not only you and your ‘guarantees,’ but your institutions and the existing order of your society.” In Keynes’s view, the Allied statesmen should have focused more on economic relief and reconstruction, and far less on borders, reparations, and restoring the pre-war balance of power.

The Paris Peace Conference marked a turning point when Keynes saw that the ideals and institutions of the pre-war era could no longer serve as the foundations for progress in the post-war era. The faith in automatic progress through saving and self-discipline had been shattered. National currencies and terms of trade were distorted by wartime inflation. Workers would henceforth demand a greater share of the fruits of capitalism than they were willing to accept prior to 1914. Keynes thought that this pointed toward new roles for the state, labor unions, and corporations in the evolution of capitalism. As he wrote, “The forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted. The economic motives and ideals of that generation no longer satisfy us. We must find a new way and must suffer again the malaise, and finally the pangs of a new industrial birth.” At this point, no one, least of all Keynes, knew what shape the new order might take.

Read More:  World War I , Treaty of Versailles 

The Evolution of Capitalism

In a series of essays he wrote during the 1920s, and which he collected into a single volume under the title   Essays in Persuasion  (1931), Keynes reflected on the evolution of the capitalist order from its origins in the eighteenth century and on the significant changes in the international system brought on by the war. In these essays, Keynes maintained that rapid changes in the economic order required parallel adjustments in economic and political theory.

Keynes envisioned an emerging system of capitalism in which large business enterprises and not-for-profit institutions operated alongside government in common efforts to promote the public interest. The friction between the public and private spheres, so much an aspect of the old order of liberalism, was giving way to a new order of cooperation among large institutions. Keynes’s corporatist vision of the capitalist order represented an evolution of liberalism beyond its nineteenth-century emphasis upon individuals, market competition, and suspicion of the state.

The rise of institutional capitalism brought with it a new separation of ownership and control in large organizations. In the past, individual entrepreneurs managed the enterprises they created, but now control was passing into the hands of expert managers who responded to different incentives. In “The End of Laissez Faire ,” a pamphlet he published in 1926, Keynes observed that “A point arrives in the growth of a big institution – a big railway or public utility enterprise but also a bank or insurance company – at which the owners of capital are almost entirely dissociated from the management, with the result that the direct personal interest of the owners (the shareholders) becomes quite secondary.” The new managers, in contrast to the founding entrepreneurs, are interested in other goals besides profit, such as stability, security of employment, reputation, and independence. Keynes also welcomed the development of semi-autonomous, not-for-profit institutions such as universities and scientific societies that promote the general interest in different spheres of activity.

Keynes pointed to two areas where the state could and should intervene to improve the operation of the modern capitalist order. The first was in the area of money and credit, where he called for deliberate control and planning by a central institution—that is, by a central bank with powers sufficient to regulate the supply of currency and credit toward the goal of full employment and stable prices. This was an implicit attack on the gold standard, which Keynes regarded as an archaic inheritance from the nineteenth century, and in the wake of the war an ineffective instrument for regulating money and credit. His second innovation was to call for public control over investment such that the state would replace banks, investment houses, and wealthy individuals as the major supplier of investment capital. In the modern world, he pointed out, “savers” and “investors” were now different people and institutions; their decisions had to be coordinated by private intermediaries that took in savings and directed them toward new and hopefully profitable enterprises. Keynes had little faith that this process could be carried out seamlessly in the public interest, and so he looked to the state as the institution where the investment function could be carried out rationally in the interests of society as a whole.

Keynes was optimistic that the slump of the 1930s was but a temporary lapse in the onward march of capitalist development. He dismissed claims that the Depression marked the end of prosperity or the collapse of the capitalist system. In an essay on the “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” he wrote that “We are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one economic period and another.” This was the painful adjustment from the age of  laissez faire  to the age of institutional capitalism. Keynes calculated that over the previous one hundred years the standard of living of the average European and American had grown at least four-fold, and that over the next one hundred years it would improve between four and eight times. Within two or three generations, he predicted, the necessities of the comfortable life would be available to all. More profoundly, according to Keynes, mankind’s long struggle for survival in the face of scarcity would then be near an end.

Like many other thinkers of his era, Keynes viewed the political and moral principles associated with market capitalism to be degrading and in need of replacement by a more humane system of ideals. There was an evolutionary or historical element in Keynes’s thought: He claimed that capitalism developed in historical stages and also in a morally favorable direction. Institutional capitalism was an improvement over the “classical” system of the nineteenth century, but still a stepping-stone on a path to the next phase of capitalist development when the “economic problem” might be solved once and for all.

Read More:  Monetarism 

The Great Depression and The General Theory

The General Theory is universally regarded as the more important of Keynes’s two major works because in it he laid out the theoretical case for counter-cyclical government spending policies that proved to be so influential in the post-war era. Though his two influential books were very different in style, substance, and purpose, both hammered at a common theme: the obsolescence of the old order in Europe.

The extended slump of the 1930s formed the background for Keynes’s treatise. The industrial economies had gone through recessions and even depressions in the past, but none as deep and prolonged as the collapse in the 1930s. Keynes was as surprised as everyone else by the severity of the slump. Disasters of this magnitude were not supposed to happen in market economies that were thought to possess self-correcting features. When the slump continued, and grew worse in the early 1930s, Keynes concluded that there was something wrong with the adjustment mechanisms of the market that was not accounted for in the standard economic theories. For Keynes, much like the Great War, the Great Depression called into question the received wisdom of the time.

In  The General Theory , Keynes mounted an attack on what he called the “classical” school of economics, the doctrine of free and self-adjusting markets developed by the political economists of the previous century. The classical theory, he suggested, is not a general theory but rather a special theory applicable to a condition of full employment and to an era of small producers, independent workers, and competitive markets, circumstances that no longer obtained in modern economies increasingly dominated by large institutions and, importantly, by labor unions. A central theme of Keynes’s theory, and of Keynesian economics in general, is that market economies do not automatically adjust to systemic shocks like stock market crashes, widespread bank failures, famines, and wars. A second is that the market system, left on its own, will operate most of the time at levels below full employment and potential output.

Keynes argued in  The General Theory  that there exists no automatic process of adjustment in wages, prices, and interest rates that would correct the slide in employment and output. Under the right circumstances, there could be a general over-production of goods, widespread unemployment, hoarding of money by consumers, and a collapse of investment—all occurring at the same time and in response to one another. This meant that the market might reach equilibrium at levels well below full employment—and Keynes argued that this was in fact what had happened in the 1930s.

The basic problem according to Keynes, and the reason market economies often fall short of potential output and “over shoot” both on the up and down sides, is that investors and businesses must make calculations about spending and hiring in the face of a fundamentally uncertain future. Investors are the “prime movers” of the economy, and also the source of market volatility. Consumers, by contrast, behave fairly predictably, spending a stable percentage of their incomes on goods and services of various kinds, except on occasions when fear and panic lead them to reduce expenditures and increase savings. Investors, on the other hand, must allocate funds and hire employees based upon uncertain assessments of conditions many years into the future. “Our knowledge of the factors that will govern the yield of an investment some years hence is usually very slight and often negligible,” he wrote in  The General Theory . To complicate matters further, the evolution of stock markets requires investors to make judgments about how other investors assess the future—since those assessments, when added up, determine the value of stocks and potential returns on investment.

Keynes drew a portrait of the market economy that was close to the opposite of that drawn by his eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors. They saw a system that operated like a machine with its various parts working in tandem to keep it moving forward, even in the face of external shocks that might slow it down but could not knock it off course for very long. In their view, entrepreneurs and investors were the rational and calculating participants that kept the economic machine moving. Keynes described a system that was inherently prone to booms and busts because its various parts did not work in harmony and because it was greatly influenced by shifting investor moods—or “animal spirits,” as he called them. In his theory, investors and business entrepreneurs were the dynamic but capricious elements, putting their funds into play and withdrawing them based upon those shifting moods about future prospects and in response to the spending and saving decisions of consumers.

This relationship between consumers and investors gave the system a “pro-cyclical” bias: Consumers and investors increased their spending in tandem with one another, but also withdrew it according to a reciprocal dynamic. This was one of the relationships that gave the market system its “boom and bust” character. Keynes looked to government spending and borrowing as a counter-cyclical factor that might stabilize the system, particularly during slumps when consumer hoarding and investor pessimism send the economy into a downward spiral. Government could borrow and spend when entrepreneurs and consumers would not or could not. This element of his theory—the new role for government—represented his most radical departure from the approach of his nineteenth-century predecessors. Keynes now viewed government as a player and partner in the capitalist process, rather than as a rival to business and a threat to individual liberty. This meant many things in practice, but most importantly that national governments must assume a greater role in maintaining employment, promoting growth, and intervening with new spending to reverse slumps.

Read More:  Great Depression , Business Cycle

World War II and Bretton Woods

When World War II began, Keynes once again took on the role as advisor to the British Treasury . Because of his experience in World War I and his prominence as an economic theorist, Keynes knew more than anyone alive about the intricacies of international lending. He was involved in negotiations with the United States over the “Lend-Lease” program in 1941 and at the end of the war negotiated a $3.75 billion loan from the United States that allowed Britain to purchase needed supplies abroad at a time when the country was effectively broke. As World War II neared its end, American and British planners were determined to avoid the errors of 1918 and 1919. The remedies Keynes proposed in 1919 — relief, reconstruction, renewal of trade, cancellation of debts, renouncement of reparations — were generally accepted in 1945 as guideposts for the post-war order.

Keynes was also the chief British negotiator at the Bretton Woods (New Hampshire) Conference in 1944 where representatives of forty-four allied nations created the institutional foundations of the post-war economic order. Keynes was the most influential figure at the conference in making the case that the international system was in need of new arrangements to replace the gold standard that would encourage debtor and creditor nations to work together to promote lending, trade, and economic growth. Keynes argued for the creation of a new international currency to facilitate trade and settle international accounts but was over-ruled by American negotiators who wanted an international regime in which national currencies were pegged to the U.S. dollar. Keynes did succeed in winning support for two principal pillars of the post war economic order: the World Bank to finance development projects and the International Monetary Fund to provide emergency loans to debtor countries temporarily unable to finance trade.

Read More:  Bretton Woods , World War II

Keynes’s Post-War Legacy

Many attributed the rapid growth in America’s post-war economy to the application of Keynes’s theories. In 1965,  Time  took note of his vast influence by publishing a cover story under the title,  “We Are All Keynesians Now.”  As the magazine acknowledged, “Keynes and his ideas, though they still make some people nervous, have been so widely accepted that they constitute both the new orthodoxy in the universities and the touchstone of economic management in Washington.” As the magazine suggested, Keynes’s theories took over the economics profession in the post-war era and provided the framework for new ways of analyzing the business cycle, unemployment, and the potential contributions of government spending to stable growth.

During the 1970s, an unprecedented combination of high unemployment and double-digit inflation caused many economists and policy-makers to lose confidence in Keynes’s theories and to look elsewhere for policy prescriptions. At this time, monetary economists gained the upper hand in explaining the sources of inflation and unemployment and in pointing to central bank policies rather than government spending as principal remedies. Though Keynes’s theories were temporarily in retreat in Washington and London during the 1980s and 1990s, they never really lost influence among academic economists who continued to insist that market economies are inherently unstable and that government spending funded by debt is an effective remedy for recessions and unemployment. The recent financial crisis has provided a new occasion for the application of Keynes’s theories.

Keynes’s theories remain controversial, especially among those who are skeptical of the large role governments have seized in economic affairs. Many skeptics point to the difficulties of applying Keynesian remedies in the real world where politicians make government budgets far more in response to political pressures than to requirements of economic growth. Economists still debate the rapidity with which market economies adjust to shocks, the extent to which government debt produces real growth versus inflation, or whether investors operate under a cloud of uncertainty or view the future in terms of rational expectations. Yet, in spite of such controversies, the fact remains that Keynes’s theories were instrumental in building the modern state, just as John Locke ’s or Adam Smith’s writings were seminal in the formation of the limited state of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For this reason, they will not be overcome by theoretical arguments alone but will undoubtedly remain influential so long as the political settlements arrived at in the 1930s and 1940s survive intact.

–Essay by James Piereson

Other Sites of Interest

John Maynard Keynes – Concise Encyclopedia of Economics

John Maynard Keynes – Online Library of Liberty

Papers of John Maynard Keynes – King’s College Archive Centre, University of Cambridge

 MacTutor

John maynard keynes.

... head and shoulders above all the other boys in the school.

... Eton greatly helped his development. He found there associates who were congenial to him, youths of intellectual distinction with whom he could quickly get on to terms of intimacy on the basis of common interests.

... logical faculty, his accuracy and his lightning speed of thought made him a thoroughly competent mathematician. He had no specific genius for mathematics; he had to take pains with his work; ... he did not seek out those abstruse regions which are a joy to the heart of the professional mathematician.

He was President of the Cambridge Union [ and ] won the Members' English essay Prize for an essay on the political opinions of Burke ...

... his axioms are good; they are simple and few and by the aid of the symbolism he deduces the whole subject from them by rigid reasoning. The very certainty and ease by which he is enabled to solve difficult questions and to detect ambiguities and errors in the work of his predecessors exemplifies and at the same time almost conceals the advance which he has made.

The mathematical calculus is astonishingly powerful, considering the very restricted premises which form its foundation... The book as a whole is one which it is impossible to praise too highly and it is hoped that it will stimulate further work on a most important subject which philosophers and logicians have unduly neglected.

For myself I am absolutely and completely desolated. It is utterly unbearable to see day by day the youths going away, first to boredom and discomfort, and then to slaughter.

...he was daily concerned with the economic management of the war. His special responsibility covered relations with allies and the conservation of England's scant supply of foreign currencies.

With the utmost respect, I must, if asked for my opinion, tell you that I regard your account as rubbish.

... the existing theory of unemployment nonsense. In a depression ... there was no wage so low that it could eliminate unemployment. Accordingly, it was wicked to blame the unemployed for their plight. The second proposition proposed an alternative explanation about the origins of unemployment and depression. This centred upon aggregate demand - i.e. the total spending of consumers, business investors, and public agencies. When aggregate demand was low, sales and jobs suffered. When it was high, all was well.

The purpose of the Arts Council of Great Britain is to create an environment, to breed a spirit, to cultivate an opinion, to offer a stimulus to such purpose that the artist and the public can each sustain and live on the other in that union which has occasionally existed in the past at the great ages of a communal civilised life.

Lord Keynes's genius was expressed in his important contributions to the fundamentals of economic science; in his power of winning public interest in the practical application of economics on critical occasions; in his English prose style ... in the brilliant wit, the wisdom, and the range of his private conversation, which would have him a valued member of any intellectual salon or coterie in the ages of polished discussion.

References ( show )

• R F Harrod, Biography in Dictionary of Scientific Biography ( New York 1970 - 1990) . See THIS LINK .
• Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Maynard-Keynes
• R B Braithwaite ( ed. ) , J M Keynes, The collected writings of John Maynard Keynes VIII : A treatise on probability ( New York, 1988) .
• D D Dillard, The Economics of John Maynard Keynes (1948 , reprinted 1982) .
• R F Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes ( London, 1951 ; reprint 1982) .
• C H Hession, John Maynard Keynes (1984) .
• M Keynes, Essays on John Maynard Keynes ( London, 1975) .
• R Lekachman, The age of Keynes : a biographical study ( Harmondsworth, 1969) .
• D E Moggridge, Keynes ( London, 1976) .
• D E Moggridge, Maynard Keynes : An Economist's Biography (1992)
• R Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes Vol 1 : Hopes Betrayed 1883 - 1920 ( London, 1983) .
• R Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes Vol 2 : The economist as saviour, 1920 - 1937 ( London, 1992) .
• M E Brady, J M Keynes's position on the general applicability of mathematical, logical and statistical methods in economics and social science, Synthese 76 (1) (1988) , 1 - 24 .
• M Hesse, Keynes and the method of analogy, Topoi 6 (1) (1987) , 65 - 74 .
• A C Pigou, John Maynard Keynes, Proc. British Acad. 32 (1946) , 395 - 414 .
• J Runde, Keynes after Ramsey: in defence of 'A treatise on probability', Stud. Hist. Philos. Sci. 25 (1) (1994) , 97 - 121 .
• P E Spargo, Sotheby's, Keynes and Yahuda - the 1936 sale of Newton's manuscripts, in The investigation of difficult things ( Cambridge, 1992) , 115 - 134 .

Additional Resources ( show )

Other pages about John Maynard Keynes:

• John Maynard Keynes' Newton the Man
• Newton's Arian beliefs
• Keynes: Probability Preface
• Keynes: Probability Introduction
• Times obituary
• Multiple entries in The Mathematical Gazetteer of the British Isles ,

Other websites about John Maynard Keynes:

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography
• Dictionary of National Biography
• Encyclopaedia Britannica
• MathSciNet Author profile
• zbMATH entry

John Maynard Keynes

An English economist who founded Keynesian economics

Who was John Maynard Keynes?

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was an English economist who was the founder of Keynesian economics. His father, John Neville Keynes, was also an economist and a lecturer at King’s College, Cambridge. His mother was a social reformer who was one of the first female graduates of King’s College

Born in Cambridge, England, Keynes was exceptionally gifted in mathematics. He went to Eton College and later transferred to King’s College, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics. After he graduated, he continued to attend classes in philosophy and economics.

Background and Career

After graduating from school, Keynes started working as a civil servant at the India Office in Whitehall. After leaving the position, he returned to the University of Cambridge to become a lecturer from 1908 until 1915. During this time, Keynes was able to leverage his experience as a civil servant to write his first book in economics called “Indian Currency and Finance” (1913). The publication eventually led him to become appointed to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance.

During the First World War in 1915, Keynes returned to work for the British government in the Treasury. He studied the terms of credit between Britain and its allies, as well as being responsible for figuring out strategies to conserve the supply of foreign currencies .

Keynes then represented the Treasury and went to the peace conference at Versailles. The conference provided him insight into the policies that were to be enforced upon Germany. It became a pivotal moment for Keynes because he resigned from the Treasury and then published another book called “The Economic Consequences of Power” in 1919. The book explained his perspective about how the Allies’ demand for reparation payments from Germany would devastate the German economy.

In the 1920s, Keynes continued to publish several books, including “A Treatise on Probability,” “A Revision of the Treaty,” “A Tract on Monetary Reform,” and the “Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill.” He continued to put out more publications during the Great Depression and Second World War while continuing to influence the British government with economic decisions and revolutionizing modern economics.

Notable Works: Keynesian Economics

One of Keynes’ most notable works is being the founder of Keynesian economics. He provided profound insight into economic recessions and what governments should do.

Keynes argued that government should play an active role in stimulating the economy in a recession by increasing spending and lowering taxes. Even if governments go into a deficit because of increased spending, he believed that doing so can create more employment opportunities and improve buying power, which can improve the economy. Keynes wrote several books that are written on the basis of Keynesian economics, which includes:

• The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money : In this publication, Keynes explained how the level of employment is determined by aggregate demand, not by the price of labor.
• The General Theory : Keynes introduced the notion of how full employment can be maintained through government spending and a budget deficit. He argued how reducing wages does not lead to a reduction in unemployment, but rather, it would decrease income, consumption, and aggregate demand. Aggregate demand is defined as the sum of consumption investment and government spending.

The Legacy of John Maynard Keynes

Keynes’ research and publications formed the basis of macroeconomics today. The notion of challenging economic principles during his day led to the establishment of Keynesian economics. Although not all aspects of Keynesian economics may be relevant today, Keynes made a profound impact on economic theory and revolutionized the world of macroeconomics.

Keynesian economics can be seen in recent years. For example, then-U.S. President Barack Obama enacted the Economic Stimulus Act , where the government spent $224 billion in education, healthcare, and unemployment benefits. The legislation helped create more jobs in the economy as the government also provided grants and loans. It was an example of Keynesian economics as the U.S. government intervened in the recession by introducing actions that could stimulate the economy.

Additional Learning Resources

CFI is the official provider of the global Certified Banking & Credit Analyst (CBCA)® certification program, designed to help anyone become a world-class financial analyst. To keep advancing your career, the additional CFI resources below will be useful:

• New Keynesian Economics
• Macroeconomics
• Neoclassical Economics
• Laissez-faire
• See all economics resources

Financial Analyst Certification

Become a certified Financial Modeling and Valuation Analyst (FMVA)® by completing CFI’s online financial modeling classes!

• Share this article

Create a free account to unlock this Template

Access and download collection of free Templates to help power your productivity and performance.

Already have an account? Log in

Supercharge your skills with Premium Templates

Take your learning and productivity to the next level with our Premium Templates.

Upgrading to a paid membership gives you access to our extensive collection of plug-and-play Templates designed to power your performance—as well as CFI's full course catalog and accredited Certification Programs.

Already have a Self-Study or Full-Immersion membership? Log in

Access Exclusive Templates

Gain unlimited access to more than 250 productivity Templates, CFI's full course catalog and accredited Certification Programs, hundreds of resources, expert reviews and support, the chance to work with real-world finance and research tools, and more.

Already have a Full-Immersion membership? Log in