Keynes, John Maynard, Baron Keynes of Tilton

Keynes, John Maynard, Baron Keynes of Tilton (b. 5 June 1883, d. 21 Apr. 1946). British economist Born in Cambridge, and educated there and before that at Eton. He worked in the India Office in 1906–8, and then returned to teach economics at Cambridge. During World War I, he worked at the Treasury, which he represented at the Paris Peace Conference. He was highly critical of the conference's results, though, and became prominent as the author of The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), in which he criticized the stifling reparations which were bound to cripple Germany and make it a continued focus of instability. He continued to advise the government on economic policy, although he was a strong critic of Churchill's return to the Gold Standard in 1925 at the prewar parity. He was an active Liberal in the 1920s, when he began to articulate his view that government spending on public works could push the depressed economy back into equilibrium. His consequent challenge to the orthodox creed concerning the ability of the market to correct itself was most comprehensively expressed in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), which became the origin of Keynesianism. His ideas failed to make an impact on government policy in the 1930s. In 1940, however, he once again became a government economic adviser, and in 1945 he headed a delegation to the USA which secured a large loan for Britain. His advocacy of government intervention to ensure full employment influenced the Beveridge Report, and was influential at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, which led to the establishment of the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. Most importantly, until the 1970s his arguments underpinned the economic policy of governments in the postwar years, both in Britain and in western and northern Europe.