Keynes

Barbara Lenes is an Edmonton-based economist.

First published in 1976 and again in 1981, this is the third edition of
a scholarly layperson’s guide to John Maynard Keynes, written by D.E.
Moggridge, an economist at the University of Toronto and co-editor of
The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Keynes is a concise but
thorough one-volume presentation of the influential British economist as
public figure. As Moggridge states, “I hope to provide something of
the flavour of the man, of his work, of his approach to the problems of
his own age, and of his influence on our own.”

Moggridge does this by providing biographical background of the time,
with particular focus on Keynes’s parents, the Bloomsbury group of
which he was a part, and his eventual focus on probability theory and
economics at Cambridge. Moggridge then divides Keynes’s life into the
Marshallian years (1908–25); the transition years, represented in his
elegant Treatise on Money (1925–31); and the making of The General
Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1931–37). He continues with
Keynes as “economist statesman” from 1936 to his death in 1946. The
book concludes with an evaluation of why Keynes was so important to the
development of modern economics, and a discussion of the schools of
thought (both for and against) that have developed around the theory he
introduced.

Updates in this edition are seen in a description of Keynes as a
theorist and politician; in a discussion of the development of his ideas
concerning the multiplier, interest, money management, and liquidity
preference; in discussions of his India sojourn, Richard Kahn, and
critics of his General Theory; and in the annotated bibliography.

In this post-Keynesian, free-market era, it is good to put aside all
the rhetoric and be reminded of what Keynes actually said and did.