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John Maynard Keynes

barrelica | Aug 13, 2009 |

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John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946) was the son of John Neville Keynes, a famous logician and writer on economic method. Educated at Eton and later at King's College, Cambridge, the younger Keynes developed interests in literature, mathematics, and later in economics. One of his teachers, the great neoclassicist economist Alfred Marshall, the commanding figure at CambridgeUniversity for three decades, strongly urged him to become a full-time economist.

Keynes was certainly a man of many talents. Unlike Adam Smith or Karl Marx, he was at hoe in world of business affairs, a shrewd dealer and financier. Only the great economist David Ricardo (1772 - 1823) could match John Maynard Keynes in financial acumen.

After graduation, Keynes soon won notice with a brilliant little book on Indian finance. He then became as advertiser to the English government in the negotiations at the end of the World War I. Dismayed and disheartened by the vengeful terms of the Versailles Treaty. Keynes wrote a brilliant polemic, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which won him international renown.

In the late 1920s, Keynes interest turned increasingly to the theory and practice of macroeconomics. In 1936, Keynes published the work for which he is most famous, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. In this book, whose influence has been compared with Marx's Das Capital and Smith's Wealth of the Nations, he rejected the idea of automatic adjustment in the economy and maintained that public policy and government expenditure are required for the prevention of economic stagnation and excessive unemployment.