John Maynard Keynes
|The Right Honourable
The Lord Keynes
Keynes in 1933
5 June 1883|
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England
|Died||21 April 1946
Tilton, near Firle, Sussex, England
|Institution||King's College, Cambridge|
School or tradition
|Influences||Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus, Alfred Marshall, Nicholas Johannsen, Knut Wicksell, Piero Sraffa, John Neville Keynes, Bertrand Russell|
|Influenced||John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Samuelson, John Hicks, Nicholas Kaldor, Joan Robinson, Hyman Minsky, Amartya Sen, Abba Lerner, Franco Modigliani, James Tobin Robert Solow, Ha Joon Chang, Joseph Stiglitz, Steve Keen, Paul Krugman, Robert Shiller, George Akerlof, Brad DeLong, Thomas Piketty, Yanis Varoufakis, Robert Reich, Zhou Xiaochuan, Wolfgang Stützel, Mariana Mazzucato, Robin Hahnel, Axel Leijonhufvud, Manmohan Singh, New Keynesian economics, Post-Keynesian economics|
John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes CB FBA (// KAYNZ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946), was a British economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and is widely considered to be one of the most influential economists of the 20th century and the founder of modern macroeconomics. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics and its various offshoots.
In the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, challenging the 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. He 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. Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions.
Following the outbreak of World War II, the leading Western economies adopted Keynes's policy recommendations, and in the two decades following Keynes's death in 1946, almost all capitalist governments had done so. Keynes's influence waned in the 1970s, partly as a result of the stagflation that plagued the Anglo-American economies during that decade, and partly because of criticism of Keynesian policies by Milton Friedman and other monetarists. He and other economists had disputed the ability of government to regulate the business cycle favourably with fiscal policy. 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 Barack Obama of the United States, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, and other heads of governments.
When Time magazine included Keynes among its Most Important People of the Century in 1999, it said that "his radical idea that governments should spend money they don't have may have saved capitalism." The Economist has described Keynes as "Britain's most famous 20th-century economist." In addition to being an economist, Keynes was also a civil servant, a director of the Bank of England, and a part of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.
- 1 Early life and education
- 2 Career
- 3 Legacy
- 4 Reception and views
- 5 Personal life
- 6 Publications
- 7 See also
- 8 Notes and citations
- 9 References
- 10 Further reading
- 11 External links
Early life and education
John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, to an upper-middle-class family. His father, John Neville Keynes, was an economist and a lecturer in moral sciences at the University of Cambridge and his mother Florence Ada Keynes a local social reformer. Keynes was the first born, and was followed by two more children – Margaret Neville Keynes in 1885 and Geoffrey Keynes in 1887. Geoffrey became a surgeon and Margaret married the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Archi