The age of the economist by Fusfeld Daniel Roland 1922-

Author:Fusfeld, Daniel Roland, 1922-
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Economics -- History
ISBN: 0321088123
Publisher: Boston : Addison-Wesley
Published: 2002-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

John Maynard Keynes

The man responsible for this revolution in social thought occupied a unique position in English public life. A member of the social and intellectual elite that had come to dominate public affairs in England, his unorthodox criticism of accepted economic policies seemed to fly in the face of all that the

reigning leaders believed. Keynes was a critic of the Establishment from within the Establishment itself.

Keynes was born in 1883 in Cambridge, England, the son of a prominent economist and logician, John Neville Keynes. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge, where he studied philosophy and economics. A favorite and brilliant pupil of Alfred Marshall, he absorbed the essentials of neoclassical economics and always accepted its analysis of production and distribution. His special field was monetary economics. He worked with the government on problems of Indian finance, and at the Treasury, in addition to lecturing at Cambridge. During the years before World War I, he became a member of the Bloomsbury set of artists and writers, which included such intellectuals as Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and Roger Fry. Typical of this group's attitude were Strachey's biographies debunking leading figures of the era in his Eminent Victorians —brilliant and critical but generally accepting the sense and order of the existing social system. This attitude was also typical of Keynes. Himself a product of a comfortable social class that considered itself born to rule because of its intelligence, training, and dedication, he nevertheless sought always to achieve better ways of doing things within the framework of the old verities. By all accounts, Keynes was a brilliant snob with a most engaging personality, but he also had an analytical mind that could immediately probe to the essentials of a problem, perceiving its broader ramifications as well as its connections with other issues. If there had to be an intellectual elite, it was fortunate that a man like Keynes was part of it.

Keynes worked at the Treasury during World War I, making quite a name for himself as a financial expert, and in 1919 he was the Treasury's chief representative at the Versailles peace conference. With an intuitive understanding of world politics and a detailed knowledge of international finance, he knew that a stable peace depended on a magnanimous settlement and a realistic reparations burden for Germany. While statesmen argued over boundaries, frontiers, and national prestige, Keynes realized that the economic problems of Europe were more important than the political. When the adopted peace treaty demanded huge reparations and ignored economic realities, Keynes resigned and returned home to write a slashing attack on the peace settlement and the men who developed it. In one of the most prophetic works of the age. The Economic Consequences of the Peace, he forecast the breakdown of the agreements and much of the economic turmoil that would follow. The book was a sensation, but it largely destroyed Keynes's official contacts with government for a decade.

Keynes went back to lecturing at Cambridge, became an executive

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