One of the 20th century’s greatest minds should be remembered with pride.
Most readers of The Property Chronicle will know John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) as an economist whose ideas influenced the fiscal policies of governments the world over. But while his reputation remains high among academics and those in the financial sector, I’m guessing that today, many people in the UK have never heard of him – in the BBC TV series, 100 Greatest Britons, he didn’t even make the cut.
Two of his most important works, The Means to Prosperity (1933) and The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), helped explain the workings of business cycles and led to nations mitigating economic recession, stagnation and high unemployment through state intervention. By investing public money in key sectors such as infrastructure, consumer demand and growth could be stimulated. As Time magazine put it in 1999, “his radical idea that governments should spend money they don’t have may have saved capitalism”. As well as in Britain, Keynes’ ideas have been applied in India, China, the EU, Sweden and perhaps most famously in the USA, where the economic models and reforms underpinning Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s, President Obama’s spending of three-quarters of a billion dollars to stimulate the US economy during the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and even the Trump government’s interventions in parts of American industry, can be regarded as Keynesian in origin.
“He believed that the arts should be available to all and that the state should invest in the nation’s cultural life in the same way that an employer might invest in their business”
