Keynes was a British economist who broke new ground in economics with his radical ideas. He is known for advocating interventionist monetary and fiscal policies to combat economic recession. These ideas were later shaped in the Keynesian economics movement.
Keynes' most famous work is the book published in 1936, known as The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, or simply the General Theory. With this book, although he accepted the theories put forward by the Classical Economists, he opposed the Classical employment theory. He found the view of the spontaneous restoration of the economy put forward by the classicists impossible. He attended the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I, representing the British Treasury.
John Maynard Keynes, (5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946) was a British economist and philosopher whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in mathematics, he built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles. One of the most influential economists of the 20th century, he produced writings that are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots. His ideas, reformulated as New Keynesianism, are fundamental to mainstream macroeconomics.
Keynes, who worked as a consultant and journalist after the war, chaired the British Delegation at the Bretton Woods Conference held in 1944, just before the end of World War II. Keynes defended the British theses against the United States theses and presented the Keynes Plan, named after him, at the conference.
Short life story
John Maynard Keynes was born into a moderately prosperous family in Cambridge, England, on June 5, 1883. His father, John Neville Keynes, was an economist and later an academic administrator at King's College, Cambridge. His mother is Florence Ada Keynes, the daughter of the prime minister. At the same time, Mother Keynes was one of the first female graduates of King's College, which John Maynard Keynes entered in 1902. At the age of 14, Keynes won a scholarship to Eton College and was accepted to the school's elite club, "Pop". Keynes, who began studying at King's College, Cambridge, in 1902, was influenced by Professor Alfred Marshall, who encouraged him to shift his academic interests from mathematics and classics to politics and economics. Additionally, the university introduced Keynes to an important group of writers and artists. The Bloomsbury group, an elite cultural circle whose members included Leonard and Virginia Woolf, painter Duncan Grant, and art critic Clive Bell, greatly influenced Keynes. Strachey, who had also entered the university two years before Keynes, simply recruited the young man into a secret society, the "Apostles." Members and associates of the society were Bloomsbury's leading spirits. Throughout his life, Keynes actively participated in and developed an affection for the group.
Keynes, who decided to do his doctorate in economics and started laying the foundations of the economy, went to India and worked as a civil servant for two years. His experience in India formed the basis of his first major work, Indian Currency and Finance, an examination of pre-World War I Indian finance and currency, published in 1913. He then returned to Cambridge and taught economics there. With the outbreak of the First World War, Keynes returned to civil service at the Treasury, where he established relations with the Allies. His analyses of India's fiscal system and monetary policies, which emerged from the experiences he gained here, were appreciated by his colleagues, too.
Although his public career went well, something was not going well for Keynes. Since World War I ended with the victory of the Central Powers, there were political tricks and heavy policies to be imposed on the defeated Germany with the Versailles Peace Treaty. Disturbed by this situation, Keynes resigned from his post at the Treasury. However, he decided to turn personal distress into public protest and published his book "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" at Christmas 1919. The lasting importance of this polemical essay lies in its analysis of the economic policies of his former boss, Prime Minister David Lloyd George, as well as in its economic analysis of the strict reparations imposed on Germany, and the impossibility of repayment of debts.