Born On This Day, 1883: John Maynard Keynes

Jim Burroway

June 5th, 2016

(d. 1946) The British economist has had a profound influence on macroeconomics and government economic policy. His ideas now carry his name — Keynesian economics — which argued that free markets didn’t always provide the best solutions in times of economic turmoil. He argued that counter cyclic spending during economic downturns could provide vital demand to keep businesses and industries afloat in times of lower employment levels. He advocated economic stimulus policies to keep people employed. “With men and plants unemployed, it is ridiculous to say that we cannot afford these new developments,” he wrote in 1928 of the need for spending on public works. “It is precisely with these plants and these men that we shall afford them.”

Keynes’s economic policies weren’t the only thing revolutionary about him in the early twentieth century. He was also very open about his sexuality. Between 1901 and 1915, he kept separate diaries where he tabulated his sexual encounters in a kind of a code that has baffled historians and biographers since then. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, a group of English writers, artists and philosophers which included E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and the artist Duncan Grant, who is said to have been Keynes’s great love. Stratchy was also a lover, but he must have gotten a glimpse at Keynes’s diary: Stratchy was put off by Keynes’s manner of “treat[ing] his love affairs statistically.” Keynes eventually married the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, and their marriage did appear to have been a satisfactory one.

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