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John Maynard Keynes Died in 1946. An Outstanding New Biography Shows Him Relevant Still. [1]
['Jennifer Szalai']
Date: 2020-05-20
Do you hear that? It’s the sound of the money printer whirring — trillions of dollars getting pumped into a collapsing economy, making the bailouts following the 2008 financial crisis look like small change.
“The Price of Peace,” Zachary D. Carter’s outstanding new intellectual biography of John Maynard Keynes, offers a resonant guide to our current moment, even if he finished writing it in the time before Covid-19. It’s rare for a 600-page economic history to move swiftly along currents of lucidity and wit, and this happens to be one of them. (Carter pays tribute to Robert Skidelsky’s three-volume biography of Keynes in the acknowledgments.) Carter begins with a love story, and ends with an elegant explanation of a credit default swap; even readers without a background in high finance will learn how to appreciate the drama of both.
Ideas, no matter how abstract, always originate in lived experience. Carter situates the development of Keynes’s economic thought in relation to his social milieu. Keynes, born in 1883, came of age amid the bohemian experimentation of the Bloomsbury Group, exchanging lovers and gossip with a set that included Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. The Bloomsberries could be at turns backbiting, encouraging, critical and adulatory; their “radical and subversive code of conduct,” coupled with a refined taste for the good life, shaped Keynes’s approach to economic questions. He was trained as a mathematician, but unlike more doctrinaire economists, he viewed markets as social phenomena. Those who studied economics, he insisted, should be curious and intellectually nimble, with an abiding interest in human psychology and ethical questions.
Keynes had little trouble changing his mind, and he tended to project that intellectual flexibility onto others, even when they didn’t deserve it. It was a quality that made him hopeful, optimistic and sometimes “dangerously naïve,” Carter writes. At the end of World War I, as an emissary from the British Treasury at the Paris peace conference, he argued vehemently against trying to wrest crippling reparations payments from Germany. His argument was both moral and pragmatic. “If Germany is to be milked,” he patiently explained to his colleagues, “she must not first of all be ruined.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/books/review-price-of-peace-john-maynard-keynes-zachary-carter.html
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