John Maynard Keynes is having a moment thanks to the UK government’s crass austerity policy and, most recently, to the new Charleston/EFG John Maynard Keynes Prize. The first winner, the eminent economist Amartya Sen delivered the first Keynes Prize talk at the Charleston Festival on Saturday.
Happily coinciding with all this is the new Keynes reader, The Essential Keynes (Penguin), edited by Keynes’s biographer, the economist Robert Skidelsky. Despite his enormous status, Keynes' works have been hard to find, so The Essential Keynes is a treasure trove.
Keynes’ comments on the crisis of 1931, when Britain disastrously returned to the gold standard, are highly pertinent today:
“If we carry ‘economy’ of every kind to its logical conclusion, we shall find that we have balanced the budget at nought on both sides, with all of us flat on our backs starving to death from a refusal, for reasons of economy, to buy one another’s services.”
Happily coinciding with all this is the new Keynes reader, The Essential Keynes (Penguin), edited by Keynes’s biographer, the economist Robert Skidelsky. Despite his enormous status, Keynes' works have been hard to find, so The Essential Keynes is a treasure trove.
Keynes’ comments on the crisis of 1931, when Britain disastrously returned to the gold standard, are highly pertinent today:
“If we carry ‘economy’ of every kind to its logical conclusion, we shall find that we have balanced the budget at nought on both sides, with all of us flat on our backs starving to death from a refusal, for reasons of economy, to buy one another’s services.”
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