John Maynard Keynes 1st Baron of Tilton (1883–1946) was a British economist who transformed economic theory and policy by linking employment and income to public and private expenditure. The best-known economist of the twentieth century, he is also renowned for his role in the creation of new international monetary institutions in World War II.
Born in Cambridge to John Neville Keynes, a celebrated philosopher and economist, and Florence Ada Keynes, once mayor of Cambridge, John Maynard’s early work in economics developed from the Marshall tradition in Cambridge, but through the 1920s and 1930s, he progressively broke new ground.
Keynes’s Treatise on Money (1930) and The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) heralded the Keynesian revolution. Keynes advocated the active intervention of government in the economy to stimulate employment and prosperity. This laid the foundation of modern macroeconomics—Keynesianism dominated Western economic discourse from the end of World War II until the mid-1970s. Keynes’s beliefs on a planned economy influenced Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ administration.
Keynes wrote Essays in Persuasion (1931) and Essays in Biography (1933.) He was also an astute collector of the writings of Isaac Newton.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by John Maynard Keynes
The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Capitalism
Investing is the one sphere of life and activity where victory, security and success is always to the minority and never to the majority.
—John Maynard Keynes
A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Opinion
There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose. … .
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Money
In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.
—John Maynard Keynes
The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems—the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Economics
Ideas shape the course of history.
—John Maynard Keynes
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Difficulty, Ideas
It is safer to be a speculator than an investor in the sense that a speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor is one who runs risks of which he is unaware.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Wealth
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