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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."
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© BIOGRAPHS
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
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.
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A new biography of john maynard keynes is right to look beyond the economics he’s chiefly remembered for..
March 26, 2015
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.”
Towering concerns.
Abu Dhabi tower demolition: calls for more clarity on tenant rights
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.”
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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.
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.
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
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 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
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
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
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
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.
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An English economist who founded Keynesian economics
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.
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.
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:
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.
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COMMENTS
John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman. by Robert Skidelsky. Read. 1 The Life of John Maynard Keynes by Roy Harrod. 2 John Maynard Keynes by Paul Davidson. 3 John Maynard Keynes by Hyman Minsky. 4 Keynes and The Market by Justyn Walsh. 5 The Unexplored Keynes and Other Essays by Anand Chandavarkar.
"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 ...
John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes[3] CB, FBA (/ keɪnz / KAYNZ; 5 June 1883 - 21 April 1946), was an English economist and philosopher whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in mathematics, he built on and greatly refined earlier work on the ...
John Maynard Keynes (born June 5, 1883, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England—died April 21, 1946, Firle, Sussex) was an English economist, journalist, and financier best known for his economic theories (Keynesian economics) on the causes of prolonged unemployment.His most important work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1935-36), advocated a remedy for economic recession ...
Zachary D. Carter is the author of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. Selected by The New York Times, The Economist, Publishers Weekly, Bloomberg, Mother Jones, TechCrunch and others as one of the best books of 2020, The Price of Peace has been longlisted for the Cundill History Prize and shortlisted for the SABEW Best in Business Award.
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 ...
He is currently Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. The first volume of his biography of John Maynard Keynes, Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920, was published in 1983. The second volume, The Economist as Saviour, 1920-1937 (1992) won the Wolfson Prize for History. The third volume, Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946 (2000) won the ...
John Maynard Keynes offers a sympathetic account of the life of a passionate visionary and an invaluable insight into the economic philosophy that still remains at the centre of political and economic thought. ROBERT SKIDELSKY is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick. His three volume biography of John Maynard ...
THE DEFINITIVE SINGLE-VOLUME BIOGRAPHY Robert Skidelsky's three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes has been acclaimed as the authoritative account of the great economist-statesman's life. Here, Skidelsky has revised and abridged his magnum opus into one definitive book, which examines in its entirety the intellectual and ideological journey that led an extraordinarily gifted young man to ...
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. by John Maynard Keynes. Read expert recommendations. "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 ...
His three volume biography of John Maynard Keynes (1983, 1992, 2000) received numerous prizes, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations. ... 5.0 out of 5 stars Best book ever written on Mr. Keynes ! Reviewed in the United States on October 16, 2013 ...
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.
Biography of John Maynard Keynes 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.
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 ...
A new biography of John Maynard Keynes is right to look beyond the economics he's chiefly remembered for. 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 ...
In the 19th century economics was the hobby of gentlemen of leisure and the vocation of a few academics; economists wrote about economic policy but were rarely consulted by. 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 ...
Biography. John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge, England, on June 5, 1883, the son of John Neville Keynes and Florence Ada Brown Keynes. His father was a prominent professor of political economy at the University of Cambridge; his mother was active in local politics and served a term as mayor of Cambridge.
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 ...
Biography. John Maynard Keynes (pronounces Canes) was born into an academic family. His father, John Nevile Keynes, was a lecturer at the University of Cambridge where he taught logic and political economy. John Nevile published Formal Logic four months after John Maynard was born. John Maynard's mother, Florence Ada Brown, was a remarkable ...
This is the first full portrait of the great economist's emotional and intellectual life and his career in the arts, political affairs, letters and philosophy. Hession shows how Keynes' deviation and unorthodoxy, attributed by Hession to Keynes' androgynous character, provide the key to the originality of his breakthrough economic theory. He evokes the intellectual life of Great Britain in the ...
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.
John Maynard Keynes. John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes (CB, FBA), was an English economist particularly known for his influence in the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics. Keynes married Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova in 1925. NB: Not to be confused with his father who also was an economist. See John Neville Keynes.
Five Best: Presidential Biographies Selected by Lindsay M. Chervinsky, the author, most recently, of 'Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedent That Forged the Republic.' By