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Karl Marx |
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His Life John Maynard Keynes was the son of John Neville Keynes (pronounced "Canes"), an economics lecturer at Cambridge University and Florence Ada Brown, a successful author and a social reformist. Keynes graduated in mathematics from King's College, Cambridge University (where he had been president of the Cambridge Union in Lent 1905), and afterwards increasingly turned his attention to economics. An adviser to the British government during World War I, he first came to public prominence with the publication of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published after the end of the war in 1919. This argued that the reparations which Germany was forced to pay to the victors in the war were too large and would lead to the ruin of the German economy. These predictions were arguably borne out when the German economy collapsed in the hyperinflation of 1923, with only a small amount of reparations ever being paid. Keynes also published his Treatise on Probability in 1920, a notable contribution to the philosophical and mathematical underpinnings of probability theory. His seminal book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was first published in 1936. In this book Keynes put forward a theory based upon the notion of aggregate demand to explain variations in the overall level of economic activity, such as were observed in the Great Depression. The book advocated activist economic policy by government to stimulate demand in times of high unemployment, for example by spending on public works. The book is often viewed as the foundation of modern macroeconomics.
Further Details Keynes' theories were so influential (even when disputed), that a topic of economics called Keynesian economics discussing his theories and their applications was named after him. 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. Keynes wrote Essays in Biography and "Essays in Persuasion", the former giving portraits of economists and notables, whilst the latter presents some of Keynes' attempts to influence decision-makers during the Great Depression. Following the war, Keynes argued in favour of a radical system for the management of currencies, involving a central bank for the world and a common unit of currency, the Bancor. Private lifeReported to have had relationships with other men in his younger days, in mid-life Keynes enjoyed a happy marriage with the famous ballerina Lydia Lopokova. Keynes was a prominent member of the Bloomsbury group. He was ultimately a successful investor building up a substantial private fortune. He enjoyed collecting books and for example collected and protected during his lifetime many of Isaac Newton's papers. Keynes died of cardiac infarction, his heart problems being aggravated by the strain of working on post-war international financial problems.
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Story of John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)