John Maynard Keynes (5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946) was a British economist whose economic philosophy, Keynesian economics, was adopted and practiced by almost every capitalist country from the 1940s to the 1970s.
Biography[]
John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England in 1883, and he was educated at Eton and Cambridge. He worked in the India Office from 1906 to 1908 and then returned to teach economics at Cambridge. During World War I, he worked at the Treasury, which he represented at the Paris Peace Conference. He was highly critical of the conference's results, though, and became prominent as the author of The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), in which he criticized the stifling reparations which were bound to cripple Germany and make it a continued focus of instability. He continued to advise the government on economic policy, although he was a strong critic of Winston Churchill's return to the Gold Standard in 1925 at the prewar parity. He was an active Liberal in the 1920s, when he began to articulate his view that government spending on public works could push the depressed economy back into equilibrium. His consequent challenge to the orthodox creed concerning the ability of the market to correct itself was most comprehensively expressed in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), which became the origin of Keynesian economics. His ideas failed to make an impact on government policy in the 1930s. In 1940, however, he once again became a government economic adviser, and in 1945 he headed a delegation to the United States which secured a large loan for Britain. His advocacy of government intervention to ensure full employment influenced the Beveridge Report, and was influential at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, which led to the establishment of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Most importantly, until the 1970s his arguments underpinned the economic policy of governments in the postwar years, both in Britain and in western and northern Europe.