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So influential was John Maynard Keynes in themiddle third of the twentieth century that an entire school of modern thought

bears his name. Many of his ideas were revolutionary; almost all were

controversial. Keynesianeconomics serves as a sort of yardstick that can definevirtually all economists who came after him.

Keynes was born in Cambridge and attended King’s College,Cambridge, where he earned his degree in mathematics in 1905. He remained there

for another year to study underalfredmarshall and arthur pigou,whose scholarship on the quantity theory of money led to Keynes’s Tract on

Monetary Reform many years later. After leaving Cambridge, Keynes took a

position with the civil service in Britain. While there, he collected the

material for his first book in economics,Indian Currency and Finance, in

which he described the workings of India’s monetary system. He returned to

Cambridge in 1908 as a lecturer, then took a leave of absence to work for the

British Treasury. He worked his way up quickly through the bureaucracy and by

1919 was the Treasury’s principal representative at the peace conference at

Versailles. He resigned because he thought the Treaty of Versailles was overly

burdensome for the Germans.

Afterresigning, he returned to Cambridge to resume teaching. A prominent journalist

and speaker, Keynes was one of the famous Bloomsbury Group of literary greats,

which also included Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell. At the 1944 Bretton

Woods Conference, where the International Monetary Fund was established, Keynes

was one of the architects of the postwar system of fixed exchange rates (see ForeignExchange). In 1925 he married the Russian ballet dancer LydiaLopokova. He was made a lord in 1942. Keynes died on April 21, 1946, survived

by his father, John Neville Keynes, also a renowned economist in his day.

Keynesbecame a celebrity before becoming one of the most respected economists of the

century when his eloquent bookThe Economic Consequences of the Peace was published in1919. Keynes wrote it to object to the punitive reparations payments imposed on

Germany by the Allied countries after World War I. The amounts demanded by the

Allies were so large, he wrote, that a Germany that tried to pay them would

stay perpetually poor and, therefore, politically unstable. We now know that

Keynes was right. Besides its excellent economic analysis of reparations, Keynes’s

book contains an insightful analysis of the Council of Four (Georges Clemenceau

of France, Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain, President Woodrow

Wilson of the United States, and Vittorio Orlando of Italy).

Keynes wrote: “The Council of Four paid noattention to these issues [which included making Germany and Austro-Hungary

into good neighbors], being preoccupied with others—Clemenceau to crush the

economic life of his enemy, Lloyd George to do a deal and bring home something

which would pass muster for a week, the President to do nothing that was not

just and right” (chap. 6, para. 2).

In the1920s Keynes was a believer in the quantity theory of money (today called monetarism).His writings on the topic were essentially built on the principles he had

learned from his mentors, Marshall and Pigou. In 1923 he wrote Tract on

Monetary Reform, and later he published Treatise on Money,both on monetarypolicy. His major policy view was that the way to stabilize theeconomy is to stabilize the price level, and that to do that the government’s

central bank must lowerinterestrates when prices tend to rise and raise them when prices tendto fall.

Keynes’sideas took a dramatic change, however, asunemployment inBritain dragged on during the interwar period, reaching levels as high as 20

percent. Keynes investigated other causes of Britain’s economic woes, and The

General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was the result.

Keynes’s GeneralTheory revolutionized the way economists think about economics. It was

pathbreaking in several ways, in particular because it introduced the notion of

aggregate demand as the sum of consumption, investment,and government spending; and because it showed (or purported to show) that full

employment could be maintained only with the help of government spending.

Economists still argue about what Keynes thought caused high unemployment. Some

think he attributed it to wages that take a long time to fall. But Keynes

actually wanted wages not to fall, and in fact advocated in the General

Theory that wages be kept stable. A general cut in wages, he argued, would

decrease income, consumption, and aggregate demand. This would offset any

benefits to output that the lower price of labor might have contributed.

Whyshouldn’t government, thought Keynes, fill the shoes of business by investing

in public works and hiring the unemployed? The General Theory advocated

deficit spending during economic downturns to maintain full employment.

Keynes’s conclusion initially met with opposition. At the time, balanced

budgets were standard practice with the government. But the idea soon took hold

and the U.S. government put people back to work on public works projects. Of

course, once policymakers had taken deficit spending to heart, they did not let

it go.

Contraryto some of his critics’ assertions, Keynes was a relatively strong advocate of

free markets. It was Keynes, not adam smith,who said, “There is no objection to be raised against the classical analysis of

the manner in which private self-interest will determine what in particular is

produced, in what proportions the factors of production will be combined to

produce it, and how the value of the final product will be distributed between

them.”1 Keynes believedthat once full employment had been achieved by fiscal policy measures,the market mechanism could then operate freely. “Thus,” continued Keynes,

“apart from the necessity of central controls to bring about an adjustment

between the propensity to consume and the inducement to invest, there is no

more reason to socialise economic life than there was before” (p. 379).

Little of Keynes’s original work survives in moderneconomic theory. His ideas have been endlessly revised, expanded, and

critiqued. Keynesian economics today, while having its roots in The

General Theory, is chiefly the product of work by subsequent economists

including john hicks, james tobin, paulsamuelson, Alan Blinder, robert solow,William Nordhaus, Charles Schultze, walter heller,and arthur okun.The study of econometrics was created, in large part, to empirically explain

Keynes’s macroeconomic models. Yet the fact that Keynes is the wellspring for

so many outstanding economists is testament to the magnitude and influence of

his ideas.