John Maynard Keynes

**John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes**, CB (5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946) was a British economist. His ideas, called Keynesian economics, had a big impact on modern economic and political theory. His ideas also had a big impact on many governments' tax and economic policies. He said governments should use tax and banking measures to stop the effects of economic recessions, depressions and booms. He is one of the fathers of modern theoretical macroeconomics.

### Personal and marital life

John Maynard Keynes was born at 7 Melville Road, Cambridge, England. His father was John Neville Keynes, an economics lecturer at Cambridge University. His mother was Florence Ada Brown, a successful author and a social reformer. His younger brother, Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982) was a surgeon and bibliophile (book lover). His younger sister Margaret (1890–1974) married the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Archibald Hill.

Keynes first went to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1902. At first he studied mathematics. Later he studied economics under A.C. Pigou and Alfred Marshall. People think Professor Marshall prompted Keynes to change his studies from mathematics and classics to economics. Keynes received his B.A. in 1905 and his M.A. in 1908.

When Keynes was young, he had romantic and sexual relationships with men. One of his great loves was the artist Duncan Grant, whom he met in 1908. Keynes was also involved with the writer Lytton Strachey. Keynes appeared to turn away from homosexual relationships around the time of the first World War. In 1918, he met Lydia Lopokova, a well-known Russian ballerina. Keynes and Lopokova married in 1925.

Keynes was a successful investor and he built up a big fortune. He nearly lost all of his money after the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Later he re-built his fortune.

He enjoyed collecting books: for example, he collected and protected many of Isaac Newton's papers.

Bertrand Russell said Keynes was the most intelligent person he had ever known. Lord Russell said: "Every time I argued with Keynes, I felt that I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool".

### Career

John Maynard Keynes got a job as a lecturer in economics at Cambridge University. The job was paid for by Alfred Marshall. Soon after, he was chosen to be on the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance. This allowed him to use his economic ideas in real life.

During World War I he worked for the Adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and to the Treasury on Financial and Economic Questions.

Keynes also attended the Conference on the Versailles Treaty to end World War I. He wrote _The Economic Consequences of the Peace_ in 1919, and _A Revision of the Treaty_ in 1922. In his books he said that the reparations which Germany was being made to pay would ruin the German economy and would lead to further fighting in Europe. These predictions were shown to be true when the German economy suffered in the hyperinflation of 1923. Reparations were only completed in 2010.

Keynes's _magnum opus_ (Latin for "_Great Work_", meaning his most famous book) was the _General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money_. The _General Theory_ was published in 1936. The ideas in that book were very different from classical economics.

Historians agree that Keynes influenced U.S. president Roosevelt's New Deal, but disagree as to what extent. Spending more than the government earned in taxes (called _deficit spending_) was used in the New Deal from 1938. But the idea had been agreed to by President Herbert Hoover. Few senior economists in the U.S. agreed with Keynes in the 1930s. With time, however, his ideas became more widely accepted.

In 1942, Keynes was raised to the House of Lords. He became **Baron Keynes** of Tilton in the County of Sussex. When he sat in the House of Lords he was a Liberal member.

During World War II, Keynes wrote a book titled _How to Pay for the War_. He said the war effort should be paid for by higher taxes. He did not like deficit spending because he wanted to avoid inflation.

### Death

Keynes died of a heart attack at his holiday home in Tilton, East Sussex. His heart problems were made worse by the strain of working on post-war international financial problems. He died soon after he arranged a guarantee of an Anglo-American loan to Great Britain. Keynes' father, John Neville Keynes (1852–1949) outlived his son by three years. Keynes's brother Sir Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982) was a distinguished surgeon, scholar and bibliophile. His nephews include Richard Keynes (born 1919) a physiologist; and Quentin Keynes (1921–2003) an adventurer and bibliophile. Keynes did not have children.

## Bibliography

- 1915 _The Economics of War in Germany_
- 1919 _The Economic Consequences of the Peace_
- _Essays in Persuasion_
- _A Treatise On Probability_
- _Tract on Monetary Reform_
- _The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money_

## Influences on Keynes' works

These people influenced Keynes:
- Knut Wicksell
- Arthur C. Pigou
- Alfred Marshall
- Adam Smith
- David Ricardo
- Dennis Robertson
- Karl Marx
- Thomas Malthus
- Michal Kalecki

## Related pages

- Keynesian economics or Keynesianism
- Michał Kalecki
- Simon Kuznets
- Paul Samuelson
- John Hicks
- John Kenneth Galbraith
- G.L.S. Shackle
- Silvio Gesell

## General sources

- _The Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes: How the Second Industrial Revolution Passed Great Britain By_, Bernard C. Beaudreau, iUniverse, 2006,
- _Essays on John Maynard Keynes_, Milo Keynes (Editor), Cambridge University Press, 1975,
- _The Life of John Maynard Keynes_, R. F. Harrod, London, Macmillan, 1951,
- "Keynes, John Maynard," Don Patinkin, _The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics_, v. 2, 1987, pp. 19–41. Macmillan  (US Edition: )
- _John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed 1883–1920_, Robert Skidelsky, Papermac, 1992,  (US Edition: )
- _John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour 1920–1937_, Robert Skidelsky, Papermac, 1994,  (US Edition: )
- _The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy_, Daniel Yergin with Joseph Stanislaw, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998,
- _John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain 1937–1946_ (published in the United States as _Fighting for Freedom_), Robert Skidelsky, Papermac, 2001,  (US Edition: )
- _Lytton Strachey_, Michael Holroyd, 1995,

## Other websites

- Bio, bibliography, and links
- The Keynesian Revolution
- Bio at Time 100 - the most important people of the century
- John Maynard Keynes, _The Economic Consequences of the Peace_  (1919)
- John Maynard Keynes, _The end of laissez-faire_  (1926)
- John Maynard Keynes, _An Open Letter to President Roosevelt_ (1933)
- John Maynard Keynes, _The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money_ (1936)
- Eton College Keynes (Economics) Society
- Short bio with birth location
- Escoffier, Jeffrey. "Keynes, John Maynard." In Glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture. glbtq, Inc.: Chicago, 2004.
- _Essays on John Maynard Keynes and Robert Lekachman _  by Reuben L. Norman Jr., Ph.D. ( 1998-2007 )
- _Smith, Marx, Kondratieff and Keynes: Their Intellectual Life Spans, the Convergence of their Theories based upon the Long Wave Hypothesis and the Internet_  by Reuben L. Norman Jr., Ph.D. ( June 6, 1998 )
- Keynes's Career and Biographical Timeline

## Infobox (person)

- **honorific-prefix**: <small>The Right Honourable</small>
- **name**: John Maynard Keynes
- **image**: John Maynard Keynes.jpg
- **caption**: John Maynard Keynes at the Bretton Woods system, Bretton Woods Conference
- **birth place**: Cambridge, England, United Kingdom, UK
- **death place**: Tilton, Sussex, England, UK
- **death cause**: Heart attack
- **education**: Eton College and King's College, Cambridge
- **occupation**: Economist
- **spouse**: Lydia Lopokova
- **parents**: John Neville Keynes, Florence Ada Brown