John Maynard Keynes

From Philosopedia

John Maynard Keynes (5 June 1883 - 21 April 1946)

Keynes, who was born in Cambridge, England, was a world-famous economist known for his theories on the causes of prolonged unemployment and who advocated deficit necessity. He was the son of economist John Neville Keynes (1852 - 1949) and Florence Ada Brown Keynes (1861 - 1958), an activist who became Mayor of Cambridge. His brother Geoffrey was a surgeon, and his sister Margaret (1890 - 1974) was a physiologist.

During World War I, he served in the British treasurer and attended the Versailles Peace Conference - in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919, he described why he resigned in protest over the Versailles Treaty.

"Keynes and Lopokova, an oil on canvas painted by William Roberts

In 1925 Keynes married ballerina dancer Lydia Lopokova (1892 - 1981), and they tried unsuccessively to have children, according to Peter Clarke. From 1908 until 1915 he had dated artist Duncan Grant (1885 - 1978). He was a central figure in the Bloomsbury circle of sophisticates and, according to economics Professor Robert L. Heilbroner, had also been an ardent lover of biographer and critic Lytton Strachey.

Scottish Painter Duncan Grant

Keynes earned his B.A. in mathematics at King's College, Cambridge University.

The economic crisis worldwide in the 1920s and 1930s led him to write The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1935-1936), which was quoted widely because it refuted laissez-faire economic theories - he advocated that the treatment for depression was either to enlarge private investment or create public substitutes for private investment. Many Western democracies put Keynes's theories into practice, including the New Deal during Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency in the United States.

At the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, he took an active part.

Keynes, who had a heart attack in 1945, died of heart failure at his farmhouse near Firle, Sussex, England. Uninterested in religion, he directed that his ashes be scattered on the Downs above Tilton.

Works

See a photo and an extensive description of the works of Keynes.

Two 2009 works, explaining that Keynes was no socialist - but also no free-market ideologue - and was interested in what worked:

Peter Clarke, The Rise, Fall, and Return of the 20th Century's Most Influential Economist (Bloomsbury Press)

Robert Skidelsky, The Return of the Master (Public-Affairs)

(See a disinterested evaluation of the two books by Devin Leonard.)