The Right Honourable John Maynard Keynes CB FBA |
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Keynes in 1933
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Born |
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England |
5 June 1883
Died | 21 April 1946 Tilton, near Firle, Sussex, England |
(aged 62)
Institution | King's College, Cambridge |
Field | |
School or tradition |
Keynesian economics |
Alma mater | |
Influences | Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus, Alfred Marshall, Nicholas Johannsen, Knut Wicksell, Piero Sraffa, John Neville Keynes, Bertrand Russell |
Influenced | John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Samuelson, John Hicks, Nicholas Kaldor, Joan Robinson, Hyman Minsky, Amartya Sen, Abba Lerner, Franco Modigliani, James Tobin Robert Solow, Ha Joon Chang, Joseph Stiglitz, Steve Keen, Paul Krugman, Robert Shiller, George Akerlof, Brad DeLong, Thomas Piketty, Yanis Varoufakis, Robert Reich, Zhou Xiaochuan, Wolfgang Stützel, Mariana Mazzucato, Robin Hahnel, Axel Leijonhufvud, Manmohan Singh, New Keynesian economics, Post-Keynesian economics |
Contributions |
John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron KeynesCB FBA (/ˈkeɪnz/ KAYNZ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946), was a British economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and is widely considered to be one of the most influential economists of the 20th century and the founder of modern macroeconomics. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics and its various offshoots.
In the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, challenging the ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. He instead argued that aggregate demand determined the overall level of economic activity and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. According to Keynesian economics, state intervention was necessary to moderate "boom and bust" cycles of economic activity. Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions.