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John Maynard Keynes
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http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Keynes.html
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Macroeconomics, Economics, Career & Employment
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John Maynard Keynes is doubtlessly one the most important figures in the entire history of economics. He revolutionized economics with his classic book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). This is generally regarded as probably the most influential social science treatise of the 20th Century, in that it quickly and permanently changed the way the world looked at the economy and the role of government in society. No other single book, before or since, has had quite such an impact.
The son of the Cambridge economist and logician John Neville Keynes, John Maynard Keynes was bred in British elite institutions - Eton and then King's College Cambridge. In 1906, he entered the British civil service for a little while, and then returned to Cambridge in 1909.
Three life-long connections were made during this time. Firstly, Keynes would remain a fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Secondly, he became the editor of the Economic Journal in 1911, a position he would hold almost until the end of his life. He also fell in with the "Bloomsbury group", a collection of upper-class Edwardian aesthetes such as Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell and Lytton Strachey, which would serve as his "life outside of economics".
His first book on Indian currency (1913) was directly related to his experience at the India office. From 1914 to 1918, J.M.K. was called to the UK Treasury to assist with the financing of the British war economy. He excelled at his job and the influence he gained earned him a position with the British delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference in 1918. J.M.K was appalled at the vindictive nature of the peace settlement, and was particularly opposed to the devastating consequences of the heavy "reparations" payments imposed on Germany. He resigned from the conference and published his Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), denouncing the Treaty of Versailles and bringing him into the public spotlight.
After returning to Cambridge, Keynes published his Treatise on Probability (1921), where he dismantled the classical theory of probability and launched what has since become known as the "logical-relationist" theory of probability. Keynes's work caused something of a stir, arousing the young Cantabrigian logician, Frank P. Ramsey, to outline his own "subjective" theory of probability.
In 1923, Keynes published his Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), which was his contribution to the Cambridge cash-balance theory of money, then being developed by other Cambridge economists, Alfred Marshall, Arthur C. Pigou and Dennis H. Robertson. It was also in a 1923 newspaper article that he first proposed his "normal backwardation" theory of hedging and speculation.
During the course of the war, Keynes was at the Treasury and set himself to think about the post-war economic order. In 1938, he had warmed up to Benjamin Graham's proposals for an international "commodity-reserve" currency to replace the Gold Standard. In 1943, Keynes forged his ideas for "Bancor", a proposal for an international clearing union. In consultation with the Americans, Keynes eventually relented on his idea and accepted the American "White Plan" for an international equalization "fund" held in the currencies of the participating nations. However, several essential aspects of Keynes's clearing union idea were incorporated.
In 1944, Keynes led the British delegation to the international conference in Bretton Woods where the details of the system were hammered out. The American "White Plan" was accepted, countries would retain fixed exchange rates against the dollar, while the dollar itself would be matched to gold. Two institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (IBRD), were created to oversee the new international monetary system.
All these exhausting official missions and work taxed Keynes's already precarious health. He died in 1946, soon after arranging the guarantee of an American loan to Great Britain. |
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By Maynard Keynes, John
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Amazon's customers rating 
Distinguished British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) set off a series of movements that drastically altered the ways in which economists view the world. In his most important work, The...
Ranking at Amazon 1725476
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Prometheus Books
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May 1997 - Paperback
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Macroeconomics
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Our price: $14.5 (list: $16.99)
Used from: $1.63
Information updated on 03/14/2020
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1 book found | | | |
