John Maynard Keynes
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Keynes on 8 March 1946.
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| Born | 5 June 1883 Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom |
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| Died | 21 April 1946 (aged 62) Tilton, near Firle, East Sussex, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | British |
| Field | |
| School/tradition | Keynesian economics |
| Alma mater | |
| Contributions | |
In the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, overturning the older ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. Keynes instead argued that aggregate demand determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. According to Keynesian economics, state intervention was necessary to moderate "boom and bust" cycles of economic activity.[6] He advocated the use of fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. Following the outbreak of World War II, Keynes's ideas concerning economic policy were adopted by leading Western economies. In 1942, Keynes was awarded a hereditary peerage as Baron Keynes of Tilton in the County of Sussex.[7] Keynes died in 1946, but during the 1950s and 1960s the success of Keynesian economics resulted in almost all capitalist governments adopting its policy recommendations.
Keynes's influence waned in the 1970s, partly as a result of problems that began to afflict the Anglo-American economies from the start of the decade, and partly because of critiques from Milton Friedman and other economists who were pessimistic about the ability of governments to regulate the business cycle with fiscal policy.[8] However, the advent of the global financial crisis of 2007–08 caused a resurgence in Keynesian thought. Keynesian economics provided the theoretical underpinning for economic policies undertaken in response to the crisis by President George W. Bush of the United States, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, and other heads of governments.[9]
In 1999, Time magazine included Keynes in their list of the 100 most important and influential people of the 20th century, commenting that: "His radical idea that governments should spend money they don't have may have saved capitalism."[10] He has been described by The Economist as "Britain's most famous 20th-century economist."[11] In addition to being an economist, Keynes was also a civil servant, a director of the Bank of England, a part of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals,[12] a patron of the arts and an art collector, a director of the British Eugenics Society, an advisor to several charitable trusts, a successful private investor, a writer, a philosopher, and a farmer.
Contents
Early life and education
According to the economist and biographer Robert Skidelsky, Keynes's parents were loving and attentive. They remained in the same house throughout their lives, where the children were always welcome to return. Keynes would receive considerable support from his father, including expert coaching to help him pass his scholarship exams and financial help both as a young man and when his assets were nearly wiped out at the onset of Great Depression in 1929. Keynes's mother made her children's interests her own, and according to Skidelsky, "because she could grow up with her children, they never outgrew home".[13]
At the age of five and a half, in January 1889, Keynes started at the Kindergarten of the Perse School for Girls for five mornings a week. He quickly showed a talent for arithmetic, but his health was poor leading to several long absences. He was tutored at home by a governess, Beatrice Mackintosh, and his mother. At eight and a half, in January 1892, he started as a day pupil at St Faith's preparatory school. By 1894 Keynes was top of his class and excelling at mathematics. In 1896 St Faith's headmaster, Ralph Goodchild, wrote that Keynes was "head and shoulders above all the other boys in the school" and was confident that Keynes could get a scholarship to Eton.[13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]
Keynes won a scholarship to Eton College in 1897, where he displayed talent in a wide range of subjects, particularly mathematics, classics and history. At Eton, Keynes experienced the first "love of his life" in Dan Macmillan, older brother of the future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.[25] Despite his middle-class background, Keynes mixed easily with upper-class pupils. In 1902 Keynes left Eton for King's College, Cambridge after receiving a scholarship for this also to study mathematics. Alfred Marshall begged Keynes to become an economist,[26] although Keynes's own inclinations drew him towards philosophy – especially the ethical system of G. E. Moore. Keynes joined the Pitt Club[27] and was an active member of the semi-secretive Cambridge Apostles society, a debating club largely reserved for the brightest students. Like many members, Keynes retained a bond to the club after graduating and continued to attend occasional meetings throughout his life. Before leaving Cambridge, Keynes became the President of the Cambridge Union Society and Cambridge University Liberal Club. In May 1904 he received a first class B.A. in mathematics. Aside from a few months spent on holidays with family and friends, Keynes continued to involve himself with the university over the next two years. He took part in debates, further studied philosophy and attended economics lectures informally as a graduate student. He also studied for his 1905 Tripos and 1906 civil service exams.
The economist Harry Johnson wrote that the optimism imparted by Keynes's early life is key to understanding his later thinking.[28] Keynes was always confident he could find a solution to whatever problem he turned his attention to, and retained a lasting faith in the ability of government officials to do good.[29] Keynes's optimism was also cultural, in two senses – he was of the last generation raised by an empire still at the height of its power, in its own eyes and by much of the world (at least outwardly) seen as preeminent in both power and benevolence. Keynes was also of the last generation who felt entitled to govern by culture, rather than by expertise. According to Skidelsky, the sense of cultural unity current in Britain from the 19th century to the end of World War I provided a framework with which the well-educated could set various spheres of knowledge in relation to each other and to life, enabling them to confidently draw from different fields when addressing practical problems.[13]
Career
Keynes's Civil Service career began in October 1906, as a clerk in the India Office. He enjoyed his work at first, but by 1908 had become bored and resigned his position to return to Cambridge and work on probability theory, at first privately funded only by two dons at the university – his father and the economist Arthur Pigou. In 1909 Keynes published his first professional economics article in the Economics Journal, about the effect of a recent global economic downturn on India.[30] Also in 1909, Keynes accepted a lectureship in economics funded personally by Alfred Marshall. Keynes's earnings rose further as he began to take on pupils for private tuition, and on being elected a fellow. In 1911 Keynes was made editor of The Economic Journal. By 1913 he had published his first book, Indian Currency and Finance.[31] He was then appointed to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance[32] – the same topic as his book – where Keynes showed considerable talent at applying economic theory to practical problems.His written work was published under the name "J M Keynes", though to his family and friends he was known as Maynard. (His father, John Neville Keynes, was also always known by his middle name).[33]
World War I
The British Government called on Keynes's expertise during the First World War. While he did not formally re-join the civil service in 1914, Keynes traveled to London at the government's request a few days before hostilities started. Bankers had been pushing for the suspension of specie payments – the convertibility of banknotes into gold – but with Keynes's help the Chancellor of the Exchequer (then Lloyd George) was persuaded that this would be a bad idea, as it would hurt the future reputation of the city if payments were suspended before absolutely necessary.In January 1915 Keynes took up an official government position at the Treasury. Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war, and the acquisition of scarce currencies. According to economist Robert Lekachman, Keynes's "nerve and mastery became legendary" because of his performance of these duties, as in the case where he managed to assemble – with difficulty – a small supply of Spanish pesetas. The secretary of the Treasury was delighted to hear Keynes had amassed enough to provide a temporary solution for the British Government. But Keynes did not hand the pesetas over, choosing instead to sell them all to break the market: his boldness paid off, as pesetas then became much less scarce and expensive.[34] In the 1917 King's Birthday Honours, Keynes was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath for his wartime work,[35] and his success led to the appointment that would have a huge effect on Keynes's life and career; Keynes was appointed financial representative for the Treasury to the 1919 Versailles peace conference. He was also appointed Officer of the Belgian Order of Leopold.[36]
Versailles peace conference
Main article: Heavenly Twins (Sumner and Cunliffe)
The three principal players at Versailles were Britain's Lloyd George, France's Clemenceau and America's President Wilson.[37] It was only Lloyd George to whom Keynes had much direct access; until the 1918 election he had some sympathy with Keynes's view but while campaigning had found his speeches were only well received by the public if he promised to harshly punish Germany, and had therefore committed to extracting high payments. Lloyd George did however win some loyalty from Keynes with his actions at the Paris conference by intervening against the French to ensure the dispatch of much-needed food supplies to German civilians. Clemenceau also pushed for high reparations; generally France argued for an even more severe settlement than Britain. Wilson initially favoured relatively lenient treatment of Germany – he feared too harsh conditions could foment the rise of extremism, and wanted Germany to be left sufficient capital to pay for imports. To Keynes's dismay, Lloyd George and Clemenceau were able to pressure Wilson to agree to very high repayments being imposed. Towards the end of the conference, Keynes came up with a plan that he argued would not only help Germany and other impoverished central European powers but also be good for the world economy as a whole. It involved the writing down of war debts which would have the effect of increasing international trade all round. Lloyd George agreed it might be acceptable to the British electorate. However, America was against it; the US was then the largest creditor and by this time Wilson had started to believe in the merits of a harsh peace as a warning to future aggressors. Hence despite his best efforts, the end result of the conference was a treaty which disgusted Keynes both on moral and economic grounds, and led to his resignation from the Treasury.[38]
In June 1919 he turned down an offer to become chairman of the British Bank of Northern Commerce, a job that promised a salary of £2000 in return for a morning per week of work.
Keynes's analysis on the predicted damaging effects of the treaty appeared in the highly influential book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in 1919.[39] This work has been described as Keynes's best book, where he was able to bring all his gifts to bear – his passion as well as his skill as an economist. In addition to economic analysis, the book contained pleas to the reader's sense of compassion:
I cannot leave this subject as though its just treatment wholly depended either on our own pledges or on economic facts. The policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness should be abhorrent and detestable, –abhorrent and detestable, even if it were possible, even if it enriched ourselves, even if it did not sow the decay of the whole civilised life of Europe.Also present was striking imagery such as "year by year Germany must be kept impoverished and her children starved and crippled" along with bold predictions which were later justified by events:
If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long that final war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing.Keynes's predictions of disaster were borne out when the German economy suffered the hyperinflation of 1923, and again by the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the outbreak of World War II. Only a fraction of reparations were ever paid. The Economic Consequences of the Peace gained Keynes international fame, but also caused him to be regarded as anti-establishment – it was not until after the outbreak of World War II that Keynes was offered a directorship of a major British Bank, or an acceptable offer to return to government with a formal job. However, Keynes was still able to influence government policy making through his network of contacts, his published works and by serving on government committees; this included attending high-level policy meetings as a consultant.[38]
In the 1920s
In 1922 Keynes continued to advocate reduction of German reparations with A Revision of the Treaty.[38] He attacked the post World War I deflation policies with A Tract on Monetary Reform in 1923[38] – a trenchant argument that countries should target stability of domestic prices, avoiding deflation even at the cost of allowing their currency to depreciate. Britain suffered from high unemployment through most of the 1920s, leading Keynes to recommend the depreciation of sterling to boost jobs by making British exports more affordable. From 1924 he was also advocating a fiscal response, where the government could create jobs by spending on public works.[38] During the 1920s Keynes's pro stimulus views had only limited effect on policy makers and mainstream academic opinion – according to Hyman Minsky one reason was that at this time his theoretical justification was "muddled".[30] The Tract had also called for an end to the gold standard. Keynes advised it was no longer a net benefit for countries such as Britain to participate in the gold standard, as it ran counter to the need for domestic policy autonomy. It could force countries to pursue deflationary policies at exactly the time when expansionary measures were called for to address rising unemployment. The Treasury and Bank of England were still in favour of the gold standard and in 1925 they were able to convince the then Chancellor Winston Churchill to re-establish it, which had a depressing effect on British industry. Keynes responded by writing The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill and continued to argue against the gold standard until Britain finally abandoned it in 1931.[38]
During the Great Depression
Keynes had begun a theoretical work to examine the relationship between unemployment, money and prices back in the 1920s.[41] The work, Treatise on Money, was published in 1930 in two volumes. A central idea of the work was that if the amount of money being saved exceeds the amount being invested – which can happen if interest rates are too high – then unemployment will rise. This is in part a result of people not wanting to spend too high a proportion of what employers pay out, making it difficult, in aggregate, for employers to make a profit.Keynes was deeply critical of the British government's austerity measures during the Great Depression. He believed that budget deficits were a good thing, a product of recessions. He wrote, "For Government borrowing of one kind or another is nature's remedy, so to speak, for preventing business losses from being, in so severe a slump as to present one, so great as to bring production altogether to a standstill."[42]
At the height of the Great Depression, in 1933, Keynes published The Means to Prosperity, which contained specific policy recommendations for tackling unemployment in a global recession, chiefly counter cyclical public spending. The Means to Prosperity contains one of the first mentions of the multiplier effect. While it was addressed chiefly to the British Government, it also contained advice for other nations affected by the global recession. A copy was sent to the newly elected President Roosevelt and other world leaders. The work was taken seriously by both the American and British governments, and according to Skidelsky, helped pave the way for the later acceptance of Keynesian ideas, though it had little immediate practical influence. In the 1933 London Economic Conference opinions remained too diverse for a unified course of action to be agreed upon.[43]
Keynes's magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was published in 1936. It was researched and indexed by one of Keynes's favourite students, later the economist David Bensusan-Butt.[44] The work served as a theoretical justification for the interventionist policies Keynes favoured for tackling a recession. The General Theory challenged the earlier neoclassical economic paradigm, which had held that provided it was unfettered by government interference, the market would naturally establish full employment equilibrium. In doing so Keynes was partly setting himself against his former teachers Marshall and Pigou. Keynes believed the classical theory was a "special case" that applied only to the particular conditions present in the 19th century, his own theory being the general one. Classical economists had believed in Say's law, which, simply put, states that "supply creates its own demand", and that in a free market workers would always be willing to lower their wages to a level where employers could profitably offer them jobs. An innovation from Keynes was the concept of price stickiness – the recognition that in reality workers often refuse to lower their wage demands even in cases where a classical economist might argue it is rational for them to do so. Due in part to price stickiness, it was established that the interaction of "aggregate demand" and "aggregate supply" may lead to stable unemployment equilibria – and in those cases, it is the state, and not the market, that economies must depend on for their salvation.
The General Theory argues that demand, not supply, is the key variable governing the overall level of economic activity. Aggregate demand, which equals total un-hoarded income in a society, is defined by the sum of consumption and investment. In a state of unemployment and unused production capacity, one can only enhance employment and total income by first increasing expenditures for either consumption or investment. Without government intervention to increase expenditure, an economy can remain trapped in a low employment equilibrium – the demonstration of this possibility has been described as the revolutionary formal achievement of the work.[45] The book advocated activist economic policy by government to stimulate demand in times of high unemployment, for example by spending on public works. "Let us be up and doing, using our idle resources to increase our wealth," he wrote in 1928. "With men and plants unemployed, it is ridiculous to say that we cannot afford these new developments. It is precisely with these plants and these men that we shall afford them."[42]
The General Theory is often viewed as the foundation of modern macroeconomics. Few senior American economists agreed with Keynes through most of the 1930s.[46] Yet his ideas were soon to achieve widespread acceptance, with eminent American professors such as Alvin Hansen agreeing with the General Theory before the outbreak of World War II.[47][48] [49]
Keynes himself had only limited participation in the theoretical debates that followed the publication of the General Theory as he suffered a heart attack in 1937, requiring him to take long periods of rest. Hyman Minsky and other post-Keynesian economists have argued that as result of this, Keynes's ideas were diluted by those keen to compromise with classical economists or to render his concepts with mathematical models like the IS/LM model (which, they argue, distort Keynes's ideas).[30][49] Keynes began to recover in 1939, but for the rest of his life his professional energies were largely directed towards the practical side of economics – the problems of ensuring optimum allocation of resources for the War efforts, post-War negotiations with America, and the new international financial order that was presented at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.
World War II
As the Allied victory began to look certain, Keynes was heavily involved, as leader of the British delegation and chairman of the World Bank commission, in the mid-1944 negotiations that established the Bretton Woods system. The Keynes-plan, concerning an international clearing-union argued for a radical system for the management of currencies. He proposed the creation of a common world unit of currency, the bancor, and new global institutions – a world central bank and the International Clearing Union. Keynes envisaged these institutions managing an international trade and payments system with strong incentives for countries to avoid substantial trade deficits or surpluses. The USA's greater negotiating strength, however, meant that the final outcomes accorded more closely to the more conservative plans of Harry Dexter White. According to US economist Brad Delong, on almost every point where he was overruled by the Americans, Keynes was later proved correct by events.[52]
The two new institutions, later known as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), were founded as a compromise that primarily reflected the American vision. There would be no incentives for states to avoid a large trade surplus; instead, the burden for correcting a trade imbalance would continue to fall only on the deficit countries, which Keynes had argued were least able to address the problem without inflicting economic hardship on their populations. Yet, Keynes was still pleased when accepting the final agreement, saying that if the institutions stayed true to their founding principles, "the brotherhood of man will have become more than a phrase."[53][54]
Postwar
After the war, Keynes continued to represent the United Kingdom in international negotiations despite his deteriorating health. He succeeded in obtaining preferential terms from the United States for new and outstanding debts to facilitate the rebuilding of the British economy.[55]Just before his death in 1946, Keynes told Henry Clay, a professor of Social Economics and Advisor to the Bank of England [56] of his hopes that Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' can help Britain out of the economic hole it is in: "I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago." [57]
Legacy
The Keynesian ascendancy 1939–1979
Main article: Keynesian Revolution
From the end of the Great Depression to the mid-1970s, Keynes
provided the main inspiration for economic policy makers in Europe,
America and much of the rest of the world.[49]
While economists and policy makers had become increasingly won over to
Keynes's way of thinking in the mid and late 1930s, it was only after
the outbreak of World War II that governments started to borrow money
for spending on a scale sufficient to eliminate unemployment. According
to economist John Kenneth Galbraith
(then a US government official charged with controlling inflation), in
the rebound of the economy from wartime spending, "one could not have
had a better demonstration of the Keynesian ideas."[58]The Keynesian Revolution was associated with the rise of modern liberalism in the West during the post-war period.[59] Keynesian ideas became so popular that some scholars point to Keynes as representing the ideals of modern liberalism, as Adam Smith represented the ideals of classical liberalism.[60] After the war Winston Churchill attempted to check the rise of Keynesian policy-making in the United Kingdom, and used rhetoric critical of the mixed economy in his 1945 election campaign. Despite his popularity as a war hero Churchill suffered a landslide defeat to Clement Attlee whose government's economic policy continued to be influenced by Keynes's ideas.[58]
Neo-Keynesian economics
Main article: Neo-Keynesian economics
By the 1950s, Keynesian policies were adopted by almost the entire developed world and similar measures for a mixed economy were used by many developing nations. By then, Keynes's views on the economy had become mainstream in the world's universities. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the developed and emerging free capitalist economies enjoyed exceptionally high growth and low unemployment.[61] [62] Professor Gordon Fletcher has written that the 1950s and 1960s, when Keynes's influence was at its peak, appear in retrospect as a Golden Age of Capitalism.[49]
In late 1965 Time magazine ran a cover article with a title comment from Milton Friedman (later echoed by U.S. President Richard Nixon) that "We are all Keynesians now". The article described the exceptionally favourable economic conditions then prevailing, and reported that "Washington's economic managers scaled these heights by their adherence to Keynes's central theme: the modern capitalist economy does not automatically work at top efficiency, but can be raised to that level by the intervention and influence of the government." The article also states that Keynes was one of the three most important economists who ever lived, and that his General Theory was more influential than the magna opera of other famous economists, like Smith's The Wealth of Nations.[63]
Economics out of favour 1979–2007
Main article: Post-war displacement of Keynesianism
Keynesian economics were officially discarded by the British
Government in 1979, but forces had begun to gather against Keynes's
ideas over 30 years earlier. Friedrich Hayek had formed the Mont Pelerin Society
in 1947, with the explicit intention of nurturing intellectual currents
to one day displace Keynesianism and other similar influences. Its
members included Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises
along with the then young Milton Friedman. Initially the society had
little impact on the wider world – Hayek was to say it was as if Keynes
had been raised to sainthood after his death and that people refused to
allow his work to be questioned.[64][65]
Friedman however began to emerge as a formidable critic of Keynesian
economics from the mid-1950s, and especially after his 1963 publication
of A Monetary History of the United States.On the practical side of economic life, big government had appeared to be firmly entrenched in the 1950s but the balance began to shift towards private power in the 1960s. Keynes had written against the folly of allowing "decadent and selfish" speculators and financiers the kind of influence they had enjoyed after World War I. For two decades after World War II public opinion was strongly against private speculators, the disparaging label Gnomes of Zürich being typical of how they were described during this period. International speculation was severely restricted by the capital controls in place after Bretton Woods. Journalists Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson say 1968 was a pivotal year when power shifted in the favour of private agents such as currency speculators. They pick out a key 1968 event as being when America suspended the conversion of the dollar into gold except on request of foreign governments, which they identify as when the Bretton Woods system first began to break down. [66]
Criticisms of Keynes's ideas had begun to gain significant acceptance by the early 1970s as they were able to make a credible case that Keynesian models no longer reflected economic reality. Keynes himself had included few formulas and no explicit mathematical models in his General Theory. For commentators such as economist Hyman Minsky, Keynes's limited use of mathematics was partly the result of his scepticism about whether phenomena as inherently uncertain as economic activity could ever be adequately captured by mathematical models. Nevertheless, many models were developed by Keynesian economists, with a famous example being the Phillips curve which predicted an inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation. It implied that unemployment could be reduced by government stimulus with a calculable cost to inflation. In 1968 Milton Friedman published a paper arguing that the fixed relationship implied by the Philips curve did not exist.[67] Friedman suggested that sustained Keynesian policies could lead to both unemployment and inflation rising at once – a phenomenon that soon became known as stagflation. In the early 1970s stagflation appeared in both the US and Britain just as Friedman had predicted, with economic conditions deteriorating further after the 1973 oil crisis. Aided by the prestige gained from his successful forecast, Friedman led increasingly successful criticisms against the Keynesian consensus, convincing not only academics and politicians but also much of the general public with his radio and television broadcasts. The academic credibility of Keynesian economics was further undermined by additional criticism from other Monetarists trained in the Chicago school of economics, by the Lucas critique and by criticisms from Hayek's Austrian School.[49] So successful were these criticisms that by 1980 Robert Lucas was saying economists would often take offence if described as Keynesians.[68] Keynesian principles fared increasingly poorly on the practical side of economics – by 1979 they had been displaced by Monetarism as the primary influence on Anglo-American economic policy.[49] However many officials on both sides of the Atlantic retained a preference for Keynes, and in 1984 the Federal Reserve officially discarded monetarism, after which Keynesian principles made a partial comeback as an influence on policy making.[69] Not all academics accepted the criticism against Keynes – Minsky has argued that Keynesian economics had been debased by excessive mixing with neoclassical ideas from the 1950s, and that it was unfortunate the branch of economics had even continued to be called "Keynesian".[30] Writing in The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner argued it was not so much excessive Keynesian activism that caused the economic problems of the 1970s but the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of capital controls, which allowed capital flight from regulated economies into unregulated economies in a fashion similar to Gresham's Law (where weak currencies undermine strong currencies).[70] Historian Peter Pugh has stated a key cause of the economic problems afflicting America in the 1970s was the refusal to raise taxes to finance the Vietnam War, which was against Keynesian advice.[71]
A more typical response was to accept some elements of the criticisms while refining Keynesian economic theories to defend them against arguments that would invalidate the whole Keynesian framework – the resulting body of work largely composing New Keynesian economics. In 1992 Alan Blinder was writing about a "Keynesian Restoration" as work based on Keynes's ideas had to some extent become fashionable once again in academia, though in the mainstream it was highly synthesised with Monetarism and other neoclassical thinking. In the world of policy making, free-market influences broadly sympathetic to Monetarism remained very strong at government level – in powerful normative institutions like the World Bank, IMF and US Treasury, and in prominent opinion-forming media such as the Financial Times and The Economist.[72]
The Keynesian resurgence of 2008–2009
Main article: 2008–09 Keynesian resurgence
A series of major bail-outs were pursued during the financial crisis, starting on 7 September with the announcement that the U.S. government was to nationalise the two government-sponsored enterprises which oversaw most of the U.S. subprime mortgage market – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In October, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer referred to Keynes as he announced plans for substantial fiscal stimulus to head off the worst effects of recession, in accordance with Keynesian economic thought.[87][88] Similar policies have been adopted by other governments worldwide.[89][90] This is in stark contrast to the action permitted to Indonesia during its financial crisis of 1997, when it was forced by the IMF to close 16 banks at the same time, prompting a bank run.[91] Much of the recent discussion reflected Keynes's advocacy of international coordination of fiscal or monetary stimulus, and of international economic institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, which many had argued should be reformed as a "new Bretton Woods" even before the crises broke out.[92] IMF and United Nations economists advocated a coordinated international approach to fiscal stimulus.[93] Donald Markwel argued that in the absence of such an international approach, there would be a risk of worsening international relations and possibly even world war arising from similar economic factors to those present during the depression of the 1930s.[85]
By the end of December 2008, the Financial Times reported that "the sudden resurgence of Keynesian policy is a stunning reversal of the orthodoxy of the past several decades."[94] In December 2008, Paul Krugman released his book, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, arguing that economic conditions similar to what existed during the earlier part of the 20th century had returned, making Keynesian policy prescriptions more relevant than ever. In February 2009 Shiller and George Akerlof published Animal Spirits, a book where they argue the current US stimulus package is too small as it does not take into account Keynes's insight on the importance of confidence and expectations in determining the future behaviour of businessmen and other economic agents.
In a March 2009 speech entitled Reform the International Monetary System, Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People's Bank of China came out in favour of Keynes's idea of a centrally managed global reserve currency. Zhou argued that it was unfortunate that part of the reason for the Bretton Woods system breaking down was the failure to adopt Keynes's bancor. Zhou proposed a gradual move towards increased use of IMF special drawing rights (SDRs).[95][96] Although Zhou's ideas have not yet been broadly accepted, leaders meeting in April at the 2009 G-20 London summit agreed to allow $250 billion of special drawing rights to be created by the IMF, to be distributed globally. Stimulus plans have been credited for contributing to a better than expected economic outlook by both the OECD[97] and the IMF,[98][99] in reports published in June and July 2009. Both organisations warned global leaders that recovery is likely to be slow, so counter recessionary measures ought not be rolled back too early.
While the need for stimulus measures has been broadly accepted among policy makers, there has been much debate over how to fund the spending. Some leaders and institutions such as Angela Merkel[100] and the European Central Bank[101] have expressed concern over the potential impact on inflation, national debt and the risk that a too large stimulus will create an unsustainable recovery.
Among professional economists the revival of Keynesian economics has been even more divisive. Although many economists, such as George Akerlof, Paul Krugman, Robert Shiller, and Joseph Stiglitz, support Keynesian stimulus, others do not believe higher government spending will help the United States economy recover from the Great Recession. Some economists, such as Robert Lucas, questioned the theoretical basis for stimulus packages.[102] Others, like Robert Barro and Gary Becker, say that the empirical evidence for beneficial effects from Keynesian stimulus does not exist.[103] However, there is a growing academic literature that shows that fiscal expansion helps an economy grow in the near term, and that certain types of fiscal stimulus are particularly effective.[104][105]
Reception
Praise
Keynes's economic thinking only began to achieve close to universal acceptance in the last few years of his life. On a personal level, Keynes's charm was such that he was generally well received wherever he went – even those who found themselves on the wrong side of his occasionally sharp tongue rarely bore a grudge.[106] Keynes's speech at the closing of the Bretton Woods negotiations was received with a lasting standing ovation, rare in international relations, as delegates acknowledged the scale of his achievements made despite poor health.[29]Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek was Keynes's most prominent contemporary critic, with sharply opposing views on the economy.[45] Yet after Keynes's death he wrote:[107]
He was the one really great man I ever knew, and for whom I had unbounded admiration. The world will be a very much poorer place without him.For his part, Keynes praised Hayek's book The Road to Serfdom, writing to the Austrian economist that, "Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it."[42]
Lionel Robbins, former head of the economics department at the London School of Economics, who had many heated debates with Keynes in the 1930s, had this to say after observing Keynes in early negotiations with the Americans while drawing up plans for Bretton Woods:[45]
This went very well indeed. Keynes was in his most lucid and persuasive mood: and the effect was irresistible. At such moments, I often find myself thinking that Keynes must be one of the most remarkable men that have ever lived – the quick logic, the birdlike swoop of intuition, the vivid fancy, the wide vision, above all the incomparable sense of the fitness of words, all combine to make something several degrees beyond the limit of ordinary human achievement.Douglas LePan,[45] an official from the Canadian High Commission, wrote:
I am spellbound. This is the most beautiful creature I have ever listened to. Does he belong to our species? Or is he from some other order? There is something mythic and fabulous about him. I sense in him something massive and sphinx like, and yet also a hint of wings.Bertrand Russell[108] named Keynes one of the most intelligent people he had ever known, commenting:[109]
Keynes's intellect was the sharpest and clearest that I have ever known. When I argued with him, I felt that I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool.Keynes's obituary in The Times included the comment:[47]
There is the man himself – radiant, brilliant, effervescent, gay, full of impish jokes ... He was a humane man genuinely devoted to the cause of the common good.
Critiques
As a man of the centre described as undoubtedly having the greatest impact of any 20th-century economist,[41] Keynes attracted considerable criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. In the 1920s, Keynes was seen as anti-establishment and was mainly attacked from the right. In the "red 1930s", many young economists favoured Marxist views, even in Cambridge,[30] and while Keynes was engaging principally with the right to try to persuade them of the merits of more progressive policy, the most vociferous criticism against him came from the left, who saw him as a supporter of capitalism. From the 1950s and onwards, most of the attacks against Keynes have again been from the right.
What we need therefore, in my opinion, is not a change in our economic programmes, which would only lead in practice to disillusion with the results of your philosophy; but perhaps even the contrary, namely, an enlargement of them. Your greatest danger is the probable practical failure of the application of your philosophy in the United States.On the pressing issue of the time, whether deficit spending could lift a country from depression, Keynes[112] replied to Hayek's criticism in the following way:
I should... conclude rather differently. I should say that what we want is not no planning, or even less planning, indeed I should say we almost certainly want more. But the planning should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers wholly share your own moral position. Moderate planning will be safe enough if those carrying it out are rightly oriented in their own minds and hearts to the moral issue.Hayek explained the letter by saying:[113]
Because Keynes believed that he was fundamentally still a classical English liberal and wasn't quite aware of how far he had moved away from it. His basic ideas were still those of individual freedom. He did not think systematically enough to see the conflicts.According to some observers, Hayek felt that the post-World War II "Keynesian orthodoxy" gave too much power to the state and led toward socialism.[114]
While Milton Friedman described The General Theory as "a great book", he argues that its implicit separation of nominal from real magnitudes is neither possible nor desirable. Macroeconomic policy, Friedman argues, can reliably influence only the nominal.[115] He and other monetarists have consequently argued that Keynesian economics can result in stagflation, the combination of low growth and high inflation that developed economies suffered in the early 1970s. More to Friedman's taste was the Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), which he regarded as Keynes's best work because of its focus on maintaining domestic price stability.[115]
Joseph Schumpeter was an economist of the same age as Keynes and one of his main rivals. He was among the first reviewers to argue that Keynes's General Theory was not a general theory, but was in fact a special case.[116] He said the work expressed "the attitude of a decaying civilisation". After Keynes's death Schumpeter wrote a brief biographical piece called Keynes the Economist – on a personal level he was very positive about Keynes as a man, praising his pleasant nature, courtesy and kindness. He assessed some of Keynes biographical and editorial work as among the best he'd ever seen. Yet Schumpeter remained critical about Keynes's economics, linking Keynes's childlessness to what Schumpeter saw as an essentially short term view. He considered Keynes to have a kind of unconscious patriotism that caused him to fail to understand the problems of other nations. For Schumpeter[117] "Practical Keynesianism is a seedling which cannot be transplanted into foreign soil: it dies there and becomes poisonous as it dies."
Austrian School economic commentator and journalist Henry Hazlitt's The Failure of the New Economics is a paragraph-by-paragraph refutation of The General Theory. In 1960 he published the book The Critics of Keynesian Economics where he gathered together the major criticisms of Keynes made up to that year.[46]
President Harry Truman was skeptical of Keynesian theorizing, "Nobody can ever convince me that Government can spend a dollar that it's not got," he told Leon Keyserling, a Keynesian economist who chaired Truman's Council of Economic Advisers.[42]
Keynes used the word "niggers" to refer to black people in casual conversations.[118] However, this term was often used neutrally in British circles at that time, and was not necessarily an expression of negative feelings, as when, for example, he wrote to Duncan Grant that "the only really sympathetic and original thing in America are the niggers, who are charming".[119] Nonetheless fellow British observers recount being shocked by some statements he made, such as the following, apropos the Washington summer: "It's far too hot. Much too hot for white men. All right for niggers."[118] He also wrote that there was "beastliness in the Russian nature" as well as "cruelty and stupidity", and other comments which may be construed as anti-Russian.[120] Some critics, such as Rothbard, have sought to infer that Keynes had sympathy with Nazism, and a number of writers have described him as antisemitic. Keynes's private letters express portraits and descriptions some of which can be characterised as antisemitic, others as philosemitic.[121][122] Scholars have suggested that these reflect clichés current at the time that he accepted uncritically, rather than any racism.[119] Keynes had many Jewish friends, including Isaiah Berlin and Piero Sraffa.[123][124] Keynes several times used his influence to help his Jewish friends, most notably when he successfully lobbied for Ludwig Wittgenstein to be allowed residency in the United Kingdom explicitly in order to rescue him from being deported to Nazi-occupied Austria. Keynes was, furthermore, a supporter of Zionism, serving on committees supporting the cause.[119]
Allegations that he was racist or had totalitarian beliefs have been rejected by biographers such as Robert Skidelsky.[29] Professor Gordon Fletcher writes that "the suggestion of a link between Keynes and any support of totalitarianism cannot be sustained".[49] Once the aggressive tendencies of the Nazis towards Jews and other minorities became apparent, Keynes made clear his loathing of Nazism. As a lifelong pacifist he had initially favoured peaceful containment, yet he began to advocate a forceful resolution while many conservatives were still arguing for appeasement. After the war started he roundly criticised the Left for losing their nerve to confront Hitler:
The intelligentsia of the Left were the loudest in demanding that the Nazi aggression should be resisted at all costs. When it comes to a showdown, scarce four weeks have passed before they remember that they are pacifists and write defeatist letters to your columns, leaving the defence of freedom and civilisation to Colonel Blimp and the Old School Tie, for whom Three Cheers.[45]Keynes has been characterised as being indifferent or even positive about mild inflation.[125] Keynes had indeed expressed a preference for inflation over deflation, saying that if one has to choose between the two evils it is "better to disappoint the rentier" than to inflict pain on working-class families.[126] However, Keynes was also aware of the dangers of inflation.[49] In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes had written:
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.[125]
Personal life
Relationships
Attitudes in the Bloomsbury Group, in which Keynes was avidly involved, were relaxed about homosexuality. Keynes, together with writer Lytton Strachey, had reshaped the Victorian attitudes of the Cambridge Apostles: "since [their] time, homosexual relations among the members were for a time common", wrote Bertrand Russell.[131] The artist Duncan Grant, whom he met in 1908, was one of Keynes's great loves. Keynes was also involved with Lytton Strachey,[127] though they were for the most part love rivals, and not lovers. Keynes had won the affections of Arthur Hobhouse,[132] as well as Grant, both times falling out with a jealous Strachey for it.[133] Strachey had previously found himself put off by Keynes, not least because of his manner of "treat[ing] his love affairs statistically".[134]
Political opponents have used Keynes' sexuality to attack his academic work.[135] One line of attack held that he was uninterested in the long term ramifications of his theories because he had no children.[135]
Keynes' friends in the Bloomsbury Group were initially surprised when, in his later years, he began dating and pursuing affairs with women,[136] demonstrating himself to be bisexual.[137] Ray Costelloe (who would later marry Oliver Strachey) was an early heterosexual interest of Keynes.[138] In 1906, Keynes had written of this infatuation that, "I seem to have fallen in love with Ray a little bit, but as she isn't male I haven't [been] able to think of any suitable steps to take."[139]
Marriage
In 1921, Keynes wrote that he had fallen "very much in love" with Lydia Lopokova, a well-known Russian ballerina, and one of the stars of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.[140] In the early years of his courtship, he maintained an affair with a younger man, Sebastian Sprott, in tandem with Lopokova, but eventually chose Lopokova exclusively.[141][142] They married in 1925.[108][127] The union was happy, with biographer Peter Clarke writing that the marriage gave Keynes "a new focus, a new emotional stability and a sheer delight of which he never wearied".[33][143] Lydia became pregnant in 1927 but miscarried.[33] Among Keynes's Bloomsbury friends, Lopokova was, at least initially, subjected to criticism for her manners, mode of conversation and supposedly humble social origins – the latter of the ostensible causes being particularly noted in the letters of Vanessa and Clive Bell, and Virginia Woolf.[144][145] In her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), Woolf bases the character of Rezia Warren Smith on Lopokova.[146] E. M. Forster would later write in contrition: "How we all used to underestimate her".[144]
Support for the arts
Keynes was interested in literature in general and drama in particular and supported the Cambridge Arts Theatre financially, which allowed the institution, at least for a while, to become a major British stage outside of London.[108]Keynes's personal interest in classical opera and dance led him to support the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and the Ballet Company at Sadler's Wells. During the War as a member of CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) Keynes helped secure government funds to maintain both companies while their venues were shut. Following the War Keynes was instrumental in establishing the Arts Council of Great Britain and was the founding Chairman in 1946. Unsurprisingly from the start the two organisations that received the largest grant from the new body were the Royal Opera House and Sadler's Wells.
Like several other notable British authors of his time, Keynes was a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia Woolf's biographer tells an anecdote on how Virginia Woolf, Keynes and T. S. Eliot would discuss religion at a dinner party, in the context of their struggle against Victorian era morality.[148] Keynes may have been confirmed,[149] but by university he was clearly an agnostic, which he remained until his death.[150] According to one biographer, "he was never able to take religion seriously, regarding it as a strange aberration of the human mind."[149]
Investments
Keynes was ultimately a successful investor, building up a private fortune. His assets were nearly wiped out following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which he did not foresee, but he soon recouped. At Keynes's death, in 1946, his net worth stood just short of £500,000 – equivalent to about £11 million ($16.5 million) in 2009. The sum had been amassed despite lavish support for various good causes and his personal ethic which made him reluctant to sell on a falling market in cases where he saw such behaviour as likely to deepen a slump.[151]Keynes built up a substantial collection of fine art, including works, not all of them minor, by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Seurat (some of which can now be seen at the Fitzwilliam Museum).[108] He enjoyed collecting books: for example, he collected and protected many of Isaac Newton's papers. It is in part on the basis of these papers that Keynes wrote of Newton as "the last of the magicians."[152]
Political causes
Keynes was a lifelong member of the Liberal Party, which until the 1920s had been one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom, and as late as 1916 had often been the dominant power in government. Keynes had helped campaign for the Liberals at elections from as early as 1906, yet he always refused to run for office himself, despite being asked to do so on three separate occasions in 1920. From 1926 when Lloyd George became leader of the Liberals, Keynes took a major role in defining the party's economics policy, but by then the Liberals had been displaced into third party status by the Labour party.[13]In 1939 Keynes had the option to enter Parliament as an independent MP with the University of Cambridge seat. A by-election for the seat was to be held due to the illness of an elderly Tory, and the master of Magdalene College had obtained agreement that none of the major parties would field a candidate if Keynes chose to stand. Keynes declined the invitation as he felt he would wield greater influence on events if he remained a free agent.[33]
Keynes was a proponent of eugenics. He served as Director of the British Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944. As late as 1946, shortly before his death, Keynes declared eugenics to be "the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists."[153]
Keynes once remarked that "the youth had no religion save Communism and this was worse than nothing."[148] Marxism "was founded upon nothing better than a misunderstanding of Ricardo", and, given time, he, Keynes, "would deal thoroughly with the Marxists" and other economists to solve the economic problems their theories "threaten[ed] to cause".[148]
In 1931 Keynes went on to write the following on Marxism:[154]
How can I accept the Communist doctrine, which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete textbook which I know not only to be scientifically erroneous but without interest or application to the modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, who with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human achievement? Even if we need a religion, how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the red bookshop? It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of Western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all his values.
Death
Throughout his life Keynes worked energetically for the benefit both of the public and his friends—even when his health was poor he laboured to sort out the finances of his old college,[155] and at Bretton Woods, he worked to institute an international monetary system that would be beneficial for the world economy. Keynes suffered a series of heart attacks, which ultimately proved fatal, beginning during negotiations for an Anglo-American loan in Savannah, Georgia, where he was trying to secure favourable terms for the United Kingdom from the United States, a process he described as "absolute hell."[41][156] A few weeks after returning from the United States, Keynes died of a heart attack at Tilton, his farmhouse home near Firle, East Sussex, England, on 21 April 1946 at the age of 62.[13][157] Both of Keynes's parents outlived him: father John Neville Keynes (1852–1949) by three years, and mother Florence Ada Keynes (1861–1958) by twelve. Keynes's brother Sir Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982) was a distinguished surgeon, scholar and bibliophile. His nephews include Richard Keynes (1919–2010) a physiologist; and Quentin Keynes (1921–2003), an adventurer and bibliophile. His widow, Lydia Lopokova, died in 1981.Publications
- 1913 Indian Currency and Finance
- 1914 Ludwig von Mises's Theorie des Geldes (EJ)
- 1915 The Economics of War in Germany (EJ)
- 1919 The Economic Consequences of the Peace
- 1921 A Treatise on Probability
- 1922 The Inflation of Currency as a Method of Taxation (MGCRE)
- 1922 Revision of the Treaty
- 1923 A Tract on Monetary Reform
- 1925 Am I a Liberal? (N&A)
- 1926 The End of Laissez-Faire
- 1926 Laissez-Faire and Communism
- 1930 A Treatise on Money
- 1930 Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren
- 1931 The End of the Gold Standard (Sunday Express)
- 1931 Essays in Persuasion
- 1931 The Great Slump of 1930
- 1933 The Means to Prosperity
- 1933 An Open Letter to President Roosevelt (New York Times)
- 1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
- 1940 How to Pay for the War: A radical plan for the Chancellor of the Exchequer
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