John Maynard Keynes
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| John Maynard Keynes | |
 John Maynard Keynes (right) and Harry Dexter White at the Bretton Woods Conference |
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| Born | June 5 1883 Cambridge, UK |
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| Died | April 21 1946 (aged 62) Tilton, East Sussex, UK |
| Occupation | Economist |
| Spouse | Lydia Lopokova |
| Parents | John Neville Keynes, Florence Ada Brown |
John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, CB (5 June 1883–21 April 1946) was a British economist whose ideas, called Keynesian economics, had a big impact on modern economic and political theory as well as on many governments' tax and economic policies. He said governments should use tax and banking measures to stop the effects of economic recessions, depressions and booms. He is one of the fathers of modern theoretical macroeconomics.
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[change] Biography
[change] Personal and marital life
Born at 7 Melville Road, Cambridge, John Maynard Keynes was the son of John Neville Keynes, an economics lecturer at Cambridge University, and Florence Ada Brown, a successful author and a social reformer. His younger brother Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982) was a surgeon and bibliophile and his younger sister Margaret (1890–1974) married the Nobel-prize-winning physiologist Archibald Hill.
Keynes' early romantic and sexual relationships were almost all with men.[1] One of his great loves was the artist Duncan Grant, whom he met in 1908, and he was also involved with the writer Lytton Strachey.[1] Keynes appeared to turn away from homosexual relationships around the time of the first World War.[1] In 1918, he met Lydia Lopokova, a well-known Russian ballerina, and they married in 1925.[1]
Keynes was a successful investor, building up a big fortune. He nearly lost all of his money after the Stock Market Crash of 1929, but he soon got back his fortune. He enjoyed collecting books: for example, he collected and protected many of Isaac Newton's papers.
Bertrand Russell said Keynes was the most intelligent person he had ever known, commenting, "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."
Keynes went to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1902, to study mathematics, but moved to economics, which he studied at Cambridge under A.C. Pigou and Alfred Marshall. Marshall is believed to have prompted Keynes's shift in interest from mathematics and classics to economics. Keynes received his B.A. in 1905 and his M.A. in 1908
[change] Career
Keynes accepted a lectureship at Cambridge in economics funded personally by Alfred Marshall. Soon he was appointed to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance, where he was able to put economic theory into practice.
During World War I he worked for the Adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and to the Treasury on Financial and Economic Questions.
Keynes also attended the Conference on the Versailles Treaty to end World War I. He wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919, and A Revision of the Treaty in 1922. In his books he said that the reparations which Germany was being made to pay would ruin the German economy and would lead to further fighting in Europe. These predictions were shown to be true when the German economy suffered in the hyperinflation of 1923. Only a fraction of reparations were ever paid.
Keynes's magnum opus (latin for "Great Work, meaning his most famous book) was the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, was published in 1936. The ideas in that book were very different from classical economics.
Historians agree that Keynes influenced U.S. president Roosevelt's New Deal, but disagree as to what extent. Spending more the government earned in taxes (called deficit spending) was used in the New Deal from 1938. But the idea had been agreed to by President Herbert Hoover. Few senior economists in the U.S. agreed with Keynes in the 1930s. With time, however, his ideas became more widely accepted.[2]
In 1942, Keynes was raised to the House of Lords as Baron Keynes, of Tilton in the County of Sussex, where he sat as a Liberal member.
During World War II, Keynes argued in How to Pay for the War that the war effort should be largely financed by higher taxation, rather than deficit spending, in order to avoid inflation.
[change] Death
Keynes died of myocardial infarction (heart attack) at his holiday home in Tilton, East Sussex. His heart problems were made worse by the strain of working on post-war international financial problems. He died soon after he arranged a guarantee of an Anglo-American loan to Great Britain. Keynes' father, John Neville Keynes (1852–1949) outlived his son by three years. Keynes's brother Sir Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982) was a distinguished surgeon, scholar and bibliophile. His nephews include Richard Keynes (born 1919) a physiologist; and Quentin Keynes (1921–2003) an adventurer and bibliophile.
[change] Bibliography
- Essays in Persuasion
- A Treatise On Probability
- Tract on Monetary Reform
- The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
- The Economic Consequences of the Peace
[change] Influences on Keynes' works
- Knut Wicksell
- Arthur C. Pigou
- Alfred Marshall
- Adam Smith
- David Ricardo
- Dennis Robertson
- Karl Marx
- Thomas Malthus
- Michal Kalecki
[change] See also
- Keynesian economics or Keynesianism
- Michał Kalecki
- Simon Kuznets
- Paul Samuelson
- John Hicks
- John Kenneth Galbraith
- G.L.S. Shackle
- Silvio Gesell
[change] Other websites
- Bio, bibliography, and links
- Works by John Maynard Keynes at Project Gutenberg
- The Keynesian Revolution
- Bio at Time 100 - the most important people of the century
- John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)
- John Maynard Keynes, The end of laissez-faire (1926)
- John Maynard Keynes, An Open Letter to President Roosevelt (1933)
- John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)
- Eton College Keynes (Economics) Society
- Short bio with birth location
- Escoffier, Jeffrey. "Keynes, John Maynard." In Glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture. glbtq, Inc.: Chicago, 2004.
- Essays on John Maynard Keynes and Robert Lekachman by Reuben L. Norman Jr., Ph.D. ( 1998-2007 )
- Smith, Marx, Kondratieff and Keynes: Their Intellectual Life Spans, the Convergence of their Theories based upon the Long Wave Hypothesis and the Internet by Reuben L. Norman Jr., Ph.D. ( June 6, 1998 )
- Keynes's Career and Biographical Timeline
[change] References
- The Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes: How the Second Industrial Revolution Passed Great Britain By, Bernard C. Beaudreau, iUniverse, 2006, ISBN 0-595-41661-6
- Essays on John Maynard Keynes, Milo Keynes (Editor), Cambridge University Press, 1975, ISBN 0-521-20534-4
- The Life of John Maynard Keynes, R. F. Harrod, London, Macmillan, 1951, ISBN 1-12-539598-2
- "Keynes, John Maynard," Don Patinkin, The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, v. 2, 1987, pp. 19-41. Macmillan ISBN 0-333-37235-2 (US Edition: ISBN 0-935859-10-1)
- John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed 1883-1920, Robert Skidelsky, Papermac, 1992, ISBN 0-333-57379-X (US Edition: ISBN 0-14-023554-X)
- John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour 1920-1937, Robert Skidelsky, Papermac, 1994, ISBN 0-333-58499-6 (US Edition: ISBN 0-14-023806-9)
- The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, Daniel Yergin with Joseph Stanislaw, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998, ISBN 0-684-82975-4
- John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain 1937-1946 (published in the United States as Fighting for Freedom), Robert Skidelsky, Papermac, 2001, ISBN 0-333-77971-1 (US Edition: ISBN 0-14-200167-8)
- Lytton Strachey, Michael Holroyd, 1995, ISBN 0-393-32719-1
[change] References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/skidelsky-keynes.html}}
- ↑ Martin, Kingsley (16 March 1940). Mr Keynes Has A Plan. Picture Post.
