What
would
John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of
the 20th Century, have made of the current economic situation, ponders
philosopher John Gray.
"I can see us as water-spiders, gracefully skimming, as light
and reasonable as air, the surface of the stream without any contact at
all with the eddies and currents underneath."
That was how John Maynard Keynes, speaking in 1938 in a talk
later published as his brilliant memoir My Early Beliefs, recalled his
younger self and his friends in the
Bloomsbury Group as they had been in
the years before World War I.
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- John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was educated at Eton and Cambridge University, where he studied mathematics
- He became friends with members of the Bloomsbury group of intellectuals and artists
- Keynes joined the Treasury during World War I, and in the wake of the 1919 Versailles peace treaty, published The Economic Consequences of the Peace,
criticising exorbitant war reparations demanded from Germany, claiming
they would harm the country's economy and could foster a desire for
revenge
- During inter-war years, Keynes became a prominent arts patron
- His best-known work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936, made Keynes Britain's most influential economist
- Keynes led 1944 British delegation to the Bretton Woods
conference in the United States, playing an important role in planning
the World Bank and International Monetary Fund
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The influential Cambridge economist has figured prominently
in the anxious debates that have gone on since the crash of 2007-2008.
For most of those invoking his name, he was a kind of social engineer,
who urged using the power of government to lift the economy out of the
devastating depression of the 30s.
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Find out more
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That is how Keynes's disciples
view him today. The fashionable cult of austerity, they warn, has
forgotten Keynes's most important insight - slashing government spending
when credit is scarce only plunges the economy into deeper recession.
What is needed now, they believe, is what Keynes urged in the
30s - governments must be ready to borrow more, print more money and
invest in public works in order to restart growth.
But would Keynes be today what is described as a Keynesian?
Would this supremely subtle and sceptical mind still believe that
policies he formulated long ago - which worked well in the decades after
the
World War II - can solve our problems now?
Continue reading the story ...
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