What would Keynes do?

John Maynard Keynes (right)
and his lover, the artist,  Duncan Grant

The first thing to be said about Maynard Keynes is that he was an astonishingly intelligent man. Bertrand Russell, his contemporary at Cambridge, described the economist as having "the sharpest and clearest intellect" he had ever known.

Having transformed the study of logic, Russell was himself one of the great minds of the early 20th Century. Yet when he argued with Keynes, Russell wrote, "I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool."

Intimately familiar with the history of economic thought and widely read in many fields, producing a major treatise on the nature of probability alongside his famous General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and a host of penetrating essays, Keynes had a depth of culture that few economists could claim today.

His brilliant intelligence wasn't exercised only in the realm of theory. Keynes was an outstandingly successful investor, who lost heavily in the 1929 crash, changed his investment methods and recouped his losses, growing the funds of his Cambridge college and leaving a substantial personal fortune. He had a deep understanding of the complex, unpredictable and at times insolubly difficult nature of human events.

But Keynes didn't start out with this understanding. As he records in his memoir, he and his friends in Cambridge and Bloomsbury believed they already knew what the good life consisted in and were sublimely confident that it could be achieved. Influenced by the Cambridge philosopher GE Moore, they thought the only things that had value in themselves were love, beauty and the pursuit of knowledge.

Some of the most bold of Moore's disciples - Keynes was one of them - ventured to suggest that pleasure might also be worth pursuing, but Moore, who was something of a puritan, would have nothing of this. Despite these disagreements, Moore's was a liberating philosophy for Keynes and his friends.

Keynes viewed his early philosophy as being entirely rational and scientific in character. Yet it was also his religion, he tells us - the faith by which he and his friends lived. And, in many ways, it was not a bad faith to live by. It armed him against idolatry of the market, which he described as "the worm that had been gnawing at the insides of modern civilisation... the over-valuation of the economic criterion". To identify the goods that can be added up in an economic calculus with the good life was for Keynes - young and old - a fundamental error. The market was made for human beings - not human beings to serve the market.

At the same time, Keynes's personal religion immunised him against the faith in central economic planning that bewitched a later generation at Cambridge. He was never tempted by the lure of collectivism, which he dismissed as "the turbid rubbish of the Red bookshop". Firmly believing that nothing had value except the experiences of individuals, he always remained a liberal.

You can read the rest of Professor John Gray's intriguing BBC article here.  John Maynard Keynes was also a very competent medieval Latinist and he could have as well made his career there as in economics.  He was gay or bisexual  as he loved both men (Duncan Grant, among others) and women and married the ballet dancer Lydia Lopokova.

For my own part I have no doubt whatever that Keynes would have advocated massive deficit spending and  the monetisation of  the government debt as a solution to the looming debt deflation in Europe.  But he would also have rebuked the European governments for allowing debt to balloon in good times and all governments for permitted the rank financial excess which led to the GFC.