John Maynard Keynes, (born June five, 1883, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Eng. – died April twenty one, 1946, Firle, Sussex), English economist, journalist, and financier, best known for his economic theories (Keynesian economics) on the sources of too much unemployment. His most significant work, The General Theory of Employment, Money and Interest (1935-36), advocated a treatment for economic recession grounded on a government sponsored policy of total employment.
While the tone of Keynes’ key writings in the 1920s was sometimes suspicious, he didn’t immediately challenge the traditional wisdom of the period which favoured laissez faire – only somewhat tempered by public policy – when the very best of all potential social arrangements. Two of Keynes’ views did foreshadow the theoretical revolution he initiated in the 1930s. In 1925 he opposed Britain’s go back to the gold standard at the prewar dollar pound ratio, and well before the great Depression, Keynes portrayed concern over the chronic unemployment of British coal miners, shipyard employees, and textile laborers. Reconciled by this particular moment with Lloyd George (who was never to go back to office), he supported the Liberal Party ‘s application of public works to carry the unemployed off welfare by putting them in valuable jobs. But “respectable” economists still expected the instant changes of the free market to fix these issues, and the Treasury was convinced that public works had been ineffective because any rise in the federal government deficit would probably cause an identical decline in private investment. Though Keynes couldn’t provide a theoretical refutation of his colleagues’ opinions, he agitated for public works nonetheless.
It was only later on, in the General Theory of Employment, Money and Interest, that Keynes offered an economic foundation for government jobs plans as a solution to unemployment that is high. The General Theory, as it’s come in order to be called, is actually among the most important economics courses in history, however, its lack of clarity nonetheless causes economists in order to debate “what Keynes was truly saying.” He appeared to recommend that a decrease in wage rates wouldn’t decrease unemployment; rather, the key to lowering unemployment was increasing government spending as well as to operate a budget deficit. Governments, a lot of them searching for excuses to boost spending, wholeheartedly accepted Keynes’s opinions. The majority of his pro-colleagues also acknowledged the views of his. Interestingly, Keynes thought that the sorts of policies he advocated would work best in a totalitarian society.
Keynes’s long run effect hasn’t been as substantial as his short run impact. The Keynesian item was a primary part of economics textbooks from the late 1940s until the late 1980s. But as economists have become increasingly worried about economic growth, and a lot more educated about unemployment and inflation, prominence has been lost by the Keynesian model.
The General Theory was Keynes’s final major written work. In 1937 he suffered a serious heart attack. Two years later, although not totally recovered, he returned to training at Cambridge, wrote 3 influential posts on war finance entitled How you can finance the War, and served once more in the Treasury as an all purpose adviser. Also, he had a prominent job at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. But the institutions which resulted from that convention, the International Monetary Fund and also the World Bank, were a lot more symbolic of the theories of the United States Treasury than of Keynes’s thinking.
His last leading public service was the negotiation of his in early winter and the autumn of 1945 of a multibillion dollar loan given by the United States to Britain. Keynes died the next year.
