John Maynard Keynes

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John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron of Tilton (Cambridge, England, June 5, 1883 - London, England, April 21, 1946) was the son of John Neville Keynes, registrar of the University of Cambridge and eminent logician and economist, and Florence Ada Brown, advocate for the poor, first female Councillor of Cambridge Borough Council, and later mayor of Cambridge. He was educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, and began a short career in the civil service, where he was assigned to the India Office from 1906 to 1909. There he acquired an intimate knowledge of the government service. A reorganization of the Economics Department at Cambridge opened up an opportunity for Keynes, who had earlier come under the influence of its head, Alfred Marshall. Resigning from the civil service in 1909 Keynes was elected fellow of King's College and returned to Cambridge. In 1911 he was chosen as editor of the Economic Journal, the publication of the Royal Economic Society and one of the leading professional journals.

Keynes was greatly influenced by Alfred Marshall (1842–1924) who, besides being a brilliant and original theorist, also passionately believed that economics should contribute to human well-being and that economics students should know as much about the economic and social facts of the real world as the theoretical approaches through which they could be organised and understood. Interested in literature and philosophy, Keynes was invited to join the "Apostles" (The Cambridge Conversazione Society) , a secret society of dons and undergraduates who met to discuss ethical and political issues. The group included Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster and Bertrand Russell. Woolf and Russell brought him into contact with leaders of the Fabian Society , including Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw.

Keynes became one the most important figures in the entire history of economics. He revolutionized economics with his classic book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). This is probably the most influential social science treatise of the XXth Century. It changed the way the world looked at the economy and the role of government in society.

Major works published:

In 1913, shortly after he was appointed to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance, Keynes published his first book, Indian Currency and Finance . This book has been referred to as the best in the English language on the gold exchange standard. By 1919 Keynes was the senior Treasury official sent as part of the British delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference. Keynes disagreed with the harsh terms negotiated at Versailles and, after resigning, returned to England and wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), a controversial book which argued that the war reparations imposed on Germany could not be paid and turned Keynes a worldwide famous economist. The controversy over the Treaty of Versailles, signed in Paris in 1919, soon subsided because Keynes' predictions almost immediately started to materialize. Keynes went to Russia in 1926, interested in the study of the economic measures being taken by the communist regime. Upon his return he wrote The End of Laissez-Faire (1926). After the onset on the Depression in 1929, Keynes began to address the problems of unemployment. In a series of articles, The Means to Prosperity, written in The Times of London, Keynes began to argue that the government should "spend its way out of the depression".

On 1930 Keynes published his his first major work on economics A Treatise on Money which set out his Wicksellian Theory of the credit cycle and ignited another controversy. In this two-volume, dense work, full of brilliant insights but incomprehensible as a whole for most students, Keynes attempted, with little success, to improve upon of the Cambridge version of the quantity theory of money, laying out the rudiments of a liquidity preference theory of interest. Keynes's new book came under immediate attack form Friedrich von Hayek , the laissez-faire advocate, who wrote a review of the Treatise so harsh that Keynes decided to request Sraffa to write a review Hayek's own competing work and condemn it, no less harshly. The Keynes-Hayek conflict initiated an endless battle in the Cambridge-L.S.E. circuit, its reflexes extending to the present day.

Finally on 1936 Keynes published his "magnum opus" The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money which gave a strong theoretical support to his ideas about the causes of the economic Depression of the thirties and faced the classical economists who, in Keynes's opinion, were recommending policies which actually aggravated the recession. Keynes's concepts were already being implemented, simultaneously and intuitively, by Horace Greely Hjalmar Schacht the minister of economics (1934–37) in the National Socialist government of Adolf Hitler as well as by Roosevelt's New Deal in the United States, a few years before Keynes's book publication.

Bibliography

• Keynes's full biography. Encyclopedia of World Biography
• ASIMAKOPULOS, Athanasios. Keynes's General Theory and Accumulation (Modern Cambridge Economics Series) (Print on Demand). Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0521368154

• Keynes' theory of money and his attack on the classical model, in: Journal International Advances in Economic Research Publisher Springer Netherlands; Volume 7, Number 4; November, 2001; ISSN 1083-0898 (Print) 1573-966X (Online)