GERRIT GORTER
The present study of economics did not, of course, come out of thin air. Although thinkers in classical Greece already reflected on what we now call economics, it was largely in the eighteenth century that systematic thought on the subject began.
Two conceptual tools—the economic cycle and the idea of the invisible hand—date from that century and are still in use today, both in academic research and in education.
This site contains twenty-five portraits of important economists. Each offers a biographical sketch together with an indication of his (and, in one case, her) significance for the development of economic thought. They claim no more than to provide a first introduction to the lives and works of these pioneers.
These articles originally appeared in Dutch in the Tijdschrift voor het Economisch Onderwijs and were published on the website of Gerrit Gorter. The English translations are by Folkert Gorter.
Index
François Quesnay
Adam Smith
Thomas Robert Malthus
Jean-Baptiste Say
David Ricardo
Antoine Augustin Cournot
John Stuart Mill
Karl Marx
Walras
Carl Menger
Alfred Marshall
Vilfredo Pareto Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk
Knut Wicksell
Max Weber
Irving Fisher
Sam de Wolff
John Maynard Keynes
Joseph Alois Schumpeter
Joan Robinson
Jan Tinbergen
John Hicks
John Kenneth Galbraith
Milton Friedman
Paul Samuelson
John Maynard Keynes
England 1883–1946
Like illustrious predecessors such as John Stuart Mill and Léon Walras, John Maynard Keynes was spoon-fed economic thinking from an early age. His father, John Neville Keynes, was a not unknown economist in his day, who had written a book on the methodology of economic thought that is still highly readable today.
After a successful course of study in mathematics and economics at Cambridge (including with Alfred Marshall), Keynes entered government service at the India Office. In 1911, he became editor of the renowned British economics journal The Economic Journal — a position he held for most of the rest of his life. After a few years, he returned to Cambridge to become a Fellow — that is, to take up a teaching position there. It was also around this time that he joined the Bloomsbury Group — later to become famous — a circle of intellectuals and artists known for their liberal views. Keynes had relationships with several male members of this circle. His first biographer, Roy Harrod, carefully omitted any mention of Keynes’s homosexuality. Keynes eventually “respectably” married the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova.
During his honeymoon in 1925, traveling through what was then the Soviet Union, he encountered a non-capitalist society for the first time. He felt a certain sympathy for what he saw. He wrote, at any rate: “Here — one feels at moments — in spite of poverty, stupidity and oppression, is the laboratory of life. Here the chemicals are being mixed in new combinations, and stink, and explode. Something — there is just a chance — might come out.” So Keynes could certainly write — but as we now know, the Soviet experiment ended in definitive failure after seventy years.
Financially, Keynes became independent early on. He made it a habit to spend the first half hour of each day — in bed, as the story goes — handling his stock transactions over the phone with his bank. He was so successful at this that he soon became a wealthy man.
The peace negotiations in Paris in 1919, held after the end of the First World War and attended by Keynes as a financial expert on behalf of the British government, were a deeply frustrating experience for him. He was convinced that the victors had imposed excessively high reparations on Germany — measures that could only lead to disaster. He set out his views in the highly successful The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). Keynes, whose health had never been particularly robust, suffered a serious physical and mental breakdown in the aftermath of the negotiations.
His best-known work is The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936. No other economics book of the twentieth century has had as much influence — not only in academic circles, but also in terms of the practice of economic policy. After the Second World War, the economic policy of most Western countries was, for a time, based on Keynesian ideas.
Never one to be hampered by modesty, Keynes drew a line in The General Theory between two types of economists: on one side, virtually all of his predecessors — whom he called the “Classics” — and on the other, himself. The Classics were united in their boundless faith in the free market economy. Keynes’ central point, by contrast, was that a market economy, if left to its own devices, did not necessarily arrive at the most optimal outcome. And an economy in crisis is not always able to pull itself out of the swamp by its own hair like a Baron von Münchhausen. In his view, a guiding hand from the government was needed to avoid the worst pitfalls of capitalism.
Keynes’ final major achievement was the role he played at the Bretton Woods Conference around 1945, where the framework was laid for the postwar international financial system — particularly with regard to exchange rates. However, he never lived to see the full realization of the Bretton Woods system: he died of a heart attack in 1946.