|
Biography: John Keynes John Maynard Keynes was probably the most influential economist of the first half of the twentieth century. The son of a professor of economics, John Neville Keynes, and destined by family connection to be influential in the narrow British university world, Keynes added his own intellectual powers, daring conception, and the courage of his convictions to create an impact that a lesser mind and soul would not have had. Keynes was on the staff of the British delegation that negotiated peace after World War I, but he regarded the terms as the seeds of disaster, resigned in protest, and wrote his criticisms in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), "...bursting" (as Schumpeter wrote) "into international fame when men of equal insight but less courage and men of equal courage but less insight kept silent." Keynes became editor of the Economic Journal, certainly one of the most important of journals of professional work and research in economics then as now. After the disaster of the Great Depression, Keynes was the leading figure in a group of (mostly) younger and very creative economists who attempted to understand and explain the disaster. Borrowing freely from their ideas, Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which (again quoting Schumpeter) "was a similar feat of leadership. It taught England, in the form of an apparently general analysis, his own personal view of her social and economic situation and also his own personal view of 'what should be done about it.'" The General Theory, as it is known, also founded modern macroeconomics, and virtually all of the work in that field emerges from Keynes' work, if not positively as extensions and adaptations then negatively as criticism or the extension of criticism of it.
GO BACK TO GALLERY
|
|
|
