KEYNES, JOHN MAYNARD

(1883–1946)

British economist John Maynard Keynes was a civil servant in the India Office from 1906 to 1908, and a lecturer in economics at Cambridge University from 1908 to 1913. He was the editor of the Economic Journal from 1912 to 1945.

He joined Britain's Treasury in 1915 and was its principal representative at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. Believing the Versailles proposals on borders and reparations to be destructive and counter-productive, he resigned in 1919, setting out his objections in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919).

Keynes was closely associated with the Liberal Party; his influential and brilliantly written works attacked laissez-faire economics and the return to the gold standard, proposing a radically new approach to economic management. He returned to the Treasury in 1940, and in 1944 played a leading part in the Bretton Woods Conference that set up the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (better known as the World Bank).

Keynes wrote extensively and influentially, producing, among others, the Treatise on Money (1930) and the controversial General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), arguably the most influential work on economics since Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. The General Theory showed how aggregate demand, and therefore unemployment, was determined, and that economic systems at equilibrium had no necessary tendency toward full employment, not even with the most depressed wages. Because individual consumer spending could not create sufficient demand, unemployment must be cured by state demand management funded by a budget deficit.

Keynes devoted no major work specifically to population issues, but population concerns recur in his work. A neomalthusian view is prominent in the Economic Consequences of the Peace. There he noted that before World War I, Europe's dense population had enjoyed a high standard of living without self-sufficiency in agriculture or raw materials, relying instead on manufactured exports. He feared that such large populations could no longer be sustained following the destruction of industry and in the absence of opportunities for mass emigration.

Keynes was thus initially concerned with what he called the "Malthusian devil O of Overpopulation." This, chained up when productivity was rising, would be released when the temporarily advantageous conditions ended. Keynes campaigned against the then current pronatalist opinion, fearing that population growth would tend to reduce the standard of living, although he also feared adverse eugenic consequences if the more prudent nations, and classes, reduced their fertility before others. These views were summarized in a 1912 lecture, Population, not published until 2000 (in Toye's Keynes on Population).

In the late 1920s, Keynes changed his mind, rejecting his earlier economic pessimism and some of his Malthusian views on the perils of overpopulation. Instead he became more concerned with inadequate demand. In his 1933 biographical essay on T.R. Malthus he gave much more prominence to Malthus the economist (worried, like Keynes, about underconsumption) than to Malthus the demographer (worried about overpopulation). His Galton Lecture of 1937 was perhaps his most balanced view of population issues. In it, Keynes points to the risk that population decline–in the 1930s, for the first time in centuries, a real possibility–might unchain the other "Malthusian devil U of Underemployed resources" through excessive savings and underconsumption.

In a stationary population, he argued that the two Malthusian devils could only be kept in balance by increased consumption, more equal incomes, and low interest rates. He ended up promoting family allowances, which he had earlier condemned, while recognizing that overpopulation could exist elsewhere. Keynes was probably the most prominent economist of the twentieth century, but his inconstant efforts on population, little supported by data or technical understanding, did not show him at his best.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SELECTED WORKS BY JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES.

Keynes, John Maynard. 1919. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. London: Macmillan.

——. 1930. "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren." In his Essays in Persuasion. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991.

——. 1930. A Treatise on Money. 2 vols. London: Macmillan.

——. 1933. "Robert Malthus," in his Essays in Biography. London: Macmillan.

——. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan.

——. 1937. "Some Economic Consequences of a Declining Population." The Eugenics Review 29: 13–17.

SELECTED WORKS ABOUT JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES.

Blaug, Mark. 1990. John Maynard Keynes. London: Macmillan with the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Blaug, Mark., ed. 1991. John Maynard Keynes. 2 vols. Aldershot, Eng.: Edward Elgar.

Hutchison, T. W. 1977. Keynes versus the 'Keynesians'…? An Essay in the Thinking of J. M. Keynes and the Accuracy of Its Interpretation by His Followers. London: Institute of Economic Affairs.

Keynes, Milo. 1975. Essays on John Maynard Keynes. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Petersen, William. 1955. "J. Maynard Keynes' Theories on Population." Population Studies 8: 228–246

Skidelsky, Robert. 1983–1992. John Maynard Keynes: A Biography. 3 vols. London: Macmillan.

Toye, John. 2000. Keynes on Population. Oxford: Oxford University Press.