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- The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes.
- The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes.
- Essays in Persuasion by John Maynard Keynes.
- The End of Laissez-Faire. The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes.
May 19, 2020 · 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.
- Zachary D. Carter
- $25
- Random House
- Overview
- Background and early career
- Key contributions
- Later works and assessment
John Maynard Keynes studied at Eaton College (1897–1902) and at King’s College, Cambridge, where he received a B.A. in mathematics in 1905. Having completed a revised dissertation on probability, he was elected a fellow of King’s College in 1909.
What were John Maynard Keynes’s jobs?
John Maynard Keynes was an economic analyst in the India Office, a teacher at Cambridge, the de facto financial manager of Britain’s war effort during World War I, and (in an unpaid capacity) the country’s chief economic representative to the United States and international fora during and immediately after World War II.
What did John Maynard Keynes write?
John Maynard Keynes’s most influential work was The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1935–36). His other works included Indian Currency and Finance (1913), The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Treatise on Probability (1921), A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), A Treatise on Money (1930), and many scholarly and journalistic articles.
Why is John Maynard Keynes important?
Keynes was born into a moderately prosperous family. His father, John Neville Keynes, was an economist and later an academic administrator at King’s College, Cambridge. His mother was one of the first female graduates of the same university, which he entered in 1902.
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At Cambridge he was influenced by economist Alfred Marshall, who prompted Keynes to shift his academic interests from mathematics and the classics to politics and economics. Cambridge also introduced Keynes to an important group of writers and artists. The early history of the Bloomsbury group—an exclusive circle of the cultural elect, which counted among its members Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the painter Duncan Grant, and the art critic Clive Bell—centred upon Cambridge and the remarkable figure of Lytton Strachey. Strachey, who had entered Cambridge two years before Keynes, inducted the younger man into the exclusive private club known simply as “the Society.” Its members and associates (some of them homosexual, like Keynes himself) were the leading spirits of Bloomsbury. Throughout his life Keynes was to cherish the affection and respond to the influence of this group.
After earning a B.A. in 1905 and an M.A. in 1909, Keynes became a civil servant, taking a job with the India Office in Whitehall. His experience there formed the basis of his first major work, Indian Currency and Finance (1913), a definitive examination of pre-World War I Indian finance and currency. He then returned to Cambridge, where he taught economics until 1915. With the onset of World War I, Keynes returned to government employment, this time in the Treasury (an agency even more powerful than its American counterpart), where he studied relations with allies and recommended means of conserving Britain’s scant supply of foreign currencies.
His performance may have marked Keynes for a public career, but the Versailles Peace Conference changed his aspirations. Accompanying Prime Minister David Lloyd George to France as an economic adviser, Keynes was troubled by the political chicanery and burdensome policies that were to be imposed upon the defeated Germany. He resigned his post, depressed, to quote from a letter to his father, by the impending “devastation of Europe.”
Keynes’s reputation at Cambridge was quite different. He was esteemed as the most brilliant student of Marshall and fellow economist A.C. Pigou, authors of large definitive works explaining how competitive markets functioned, how businesses operated, and how individuals spent their incomes. After publication of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes resigned his lecture post but stayed on as a fellow of King’s College, dividing his time between Cambridge and London.
Although the tone of Keynes’s major writings in the 1920s was occasionally skeptical, he did not directly challenge the conventional wisdom of the period, which favoured laissez-faire—only slightly tempered by public policy—as the best of all possible social arrangements. Two of Keynes’s opinions did foreshadow the theoretical revolution he triggered in the 1930s. In 1925 he opposed Britain’s return to the gold standard at the prewar dollar-to-pound ratio of $4.86, and, long before the Great Depression, Keynes expressed concern over the persistent unemployment of British coal miners, shipyard workers, and textile labourers. Reconciled by this time with Lloyd George (who was never to return to office), he supported the Liberal Party’s program of public works to take the unemployed off welfare by placing them in useful jobs. But “respectable” economists still expected the automatic adjustments of the free market to solve these problems, and the Treasury was convinced that public works were useless, because any increase in the government deficit would likely cause an equal decline in private investment. Although Keynes could not offer a theoretical refutation of his colleagues’ opinions, he agitated for public works nevertheless.
Keynes’s long-run influence has not been as significant as his short-run impact. The Keynesian model was a core part of economics textbooks from the late 1940s until the late 1980s. But as economists have become more concerned about economic growth, and more informed about inflation and unemployment, the Keynesian model has lost prominence.
The General Theory was Keynes’s last major written work. In 1937 he suffered a severe heart attack. Two years later, though not completely recovered, he returned to teaching at Cambridge, wrote three influential articles on war finance entitled How to Pay for the War (1940; later reprinted as Collected Writings, vol. 9, 1972), and served once more in the Treasury as an all-purpose adviser. He also played a prominent role at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. But the institutions that resulted from that conference, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, were more representative of the theories of the United States Treasury than of Keynes’s thinking.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Learn about the life and work of John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of all time. Find out which books by him have been recommended by experts on Five Books, a platform for discovering and recommending books on various topics.
May 5, 2016 · John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, CB, FBA (/ˈkeɪnz/ KAYNZ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946), was an English economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments.
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- John Maynard Keynes
Jul 20, 2018 · Books. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. John Maynard Keynes. Springer, Jul 20, 2018 - Business & Economics - 404 pages. This book was originally published by Macmillan in 1936. It was voted the top Academic Book that Shaped Modern Britain by Academic Book Week (UK) in 2017, and in 2011 was placed on Time Magazine's top 100 ...
Jan 5, 2016 · John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) is widely considered to have been the most influential economist of the 20th century. His key books include The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919); A Treatise on Probability (1921); A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923); A Treatise on Money (1930); and his magnum opus, the General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936).
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