John Maynard Keynes Essay, Research Paper

John Maynard Keynes was born on June 5, 1883 in Cambridge, England. He died on April 21, 1946 in Firle, Sussex. Keynes father John Neville Keynes was a logician and an economist. His father was also an author of Formal Logic (1884), and Scope and Method of Political Economy (1891). John’s father was also the administrative chief of Cambridge University for 5 years. His mother Florence Ada was a pioneer in social welfare, mayor of Cambridge, and a writer. His young brother Sir Geoffrey Keynes was one of the greatest British surgeons. His sister Margaret married Dr. A. V. Hill who was a Physiologist and Nobel prize winner.

John Maynard Keynes won a scholarship to Eton. His intellectual British class made an impression on him. Keynes earned a scholarship to King’s

College at Cambridge. He got his degree in mathematics in 1905. Keynes became

close friends with members of Bloomsburry set an intellectual group. This group

was interested in fine arts, which also caught Keynes eye and stuck with him for the rest of his life. After getting his degree, he studied economics for a year, with help from Alfred Marshall. John chose A.C. Pigou as a supplementary subject for his examination of the civil service. John Maynard Keynes was admitted into the India Office in 1906.

In his spare time Keynes worked on the theory of probability and induction of submission as a dissertation for a king’s College fellowship. In 1908 he won the fellowship. In 1921 the dissertation was enlarged and published as Treatise on Probability. Keynes treatise probed to be a vast erudition of work.

When Keynes resigned in 1908 from the India office and took

fellowship at King’s Keynes, he thought that he was going to devote his life to

philosophy. However Alfred Marshall suggested that Keynes begin to teach on the economic faculty at Cambridge. After his work on probability he wrote Indian

Currency and Finance. John Maynard Keynes wrote some doctrines so good that

some people could not accept them, but said that these were his best works.

Shortly after the outbreak of World War I Keynes was offered to

work for the British Treasury. Rising to a position of great importance Keynes took charge of foreign-exchange arrangements before the war ended. Serving in the Paris Peace Conference as a British Treasury delegate John Maynard Keynes would face the main crisis of his life. The impractical unsuccessfulness of Keynes: moral plane, peace treaty should show magnanimity to the fallen foe, on the economic plane, lead to the ruin of Europe. The cause of this whole incident was because John Maynard Keynes did not like the British policy. Keynes resigned in June 1919, in a letter to the Prime Minister David Lloyd George. This letter made it so that it would be a considerable time before he could officially be employed. Keynes published an attack an the peace settlements within three months, called The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). This book was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of polemical writing. This was a best selling book on economic theme, which led to world fame for john Maynard Keynes.

Keynes became bursar of that college after returning to his academic

works. Continuing his career in writing Keynes wrote A Revision of the Treaty

(1922), a series of articles in the Manchester Guardian supplements on

Reconstruction in Europe (1922) which he took the time to edit. Investing in

foreign-exchange deals and stock-exchange deals, Keynes had to have his family

members loan him small amounts of money, this occurred shortly after the ending of the war. Keynes also improved the financial conditions of King’s College, because of his private fortune of half a million pounds; he did this with his investment policy. He had earned all of this money by 1937. From 1911-1944 Keynes was the editor of the Economic Journal. In 1925 Keynes got married to Lydia Lopokova, a Russian ballerina of the Diaghilev ballet.

In the early 1920 Keynes was very interested in the reparations tangle. In Great Britain there came to be to much unemployment, so Keynes devoted a lot of his time to evil deflation. All of what Keynes had done was printed in his 1923 Tract on Monetary Reform. For the unemployed; Keynes came to the conclusion that public works would help reduce it. Belonging to the Liberal Party; a lifelong member, Keynes probably had a lot of competition against other people in certain areas. Even though Keynes favored Herbert Asquith and was competitive against Lloyd George, he still found George to have a good idea to help the unemployed.

Keynes deciding to provide a stronger expansionist economic policy

which used to be called the “theoretical foundation.” Devoting 12 years of his life to this problem, Keynes later wrote two of his major works Treatise on Money (1930; 2 vols.) and in (1936) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. These writings involved more effort, for he thought he was creating a new

theoretical framework for economic thinking. The first of these treatises is thought

on purely monetary questions and the second one is concerned with general and

fundamental economic principles. Keynes came down with coronary thrombosis in 1937, and he never fully recovered his health.

Returning to the Treasury after World War II began, Keynes consulted most of the problems connected with the economic conduct of the war. In August 1941 consideration for postwar reconstruction after the Atlantic meeting between Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. An international organization called a “Clearing Union” was carefully planed by Keynes. This plan was in the articles of agreements of the International Monetary Fund. After becoming a member of the House of Lords as Baron Keynes of Tilton in June 1942 he made Plenty of speeches. His most important speech was the one with ideas behind the Anglo – American postwar. Transporting himself and a British team to the U.S. in 1943, to discuss economic plans with the U.S. officials. By going to Brentton Woods, N.H. a year later Keynes played a major role in the planning of the International Monetary fund and the International bank for Reconstruction and Development. A conference at Savannah, GA. In march 1946 to decide constitutional points pertaining to the Brentton Woods institutions, would be the last trip Keynes and the British team would have to take to the United States. The Americans seemed to have been hard headed and not want to listen to Keynes and the British team. They didn’t want to compromise and insisted on all of their ideas. Not accepting defeat, Keynes left the conference on a train and suffered a severe heart attack, dying at his home in Firle, Sussex, April 21,1946.