John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) is the British economist whose The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) founded modern macroeconomics and the doctrine known as Keynesianism: that a market economy can settle into an underemployment equilibrium, and that the State should manage aggregate demand — through public spending and a low rate of interest — to secure full employment. In this wiki he is the principal intellectual counterpoint to the Austrian school.

Biographical Frame

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was a British economist at the University of Cambridge (King’s College), a member of the Bloomsbury Group, and a British Treasury official across both world wars who led the British delegation at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference. His major works run from The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) — his attack on the Versailles reparations — through A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923) and A Treatise on Money (1930) to his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936).

His enduring contribution is the macroeconomic framework of the General Theory: effective demand as the determinant of output and employment, the consumption function and the multiplier, liquidity preference as the theory of the interest rate, the marginal efficiency of capital, and the rejection of the classical postulate that a market economy automatically tends to full employment. From it follows the policy programme — deficit-financed public works, a low rate of interest, and what he called a “comprehensive socialisation of investment” — that defines the Keynesian tradition.

Works Present Here

His foundational work is ingested as a clean full-text source:

• The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) — the founding text of Keynesian macroeconomics; ingested for the wiki’s Austrian-versus-Keynesian comparison.

His earlier monetary works (A Treatise on Money, A Tract on Monetary Reform) and The Economic Consequences of the Peace are referenced biographically but not yet ingested.

Place in This Wiki

Keynes is a counterpoint node. The wiki’s Austrian corpus develops its business-cycle and capital theory in explicit opposition to him: Austrian Economics vs Keynesianism sets his demand-deficiency diagnosis against the Austrian Business Cycle Theory of Hayek, Mises, and Rothbard. His prescription of cheap credit and stimulated consumption is precisely what the Austrian account of credit expansion and malinvestment treats as the cause of the cycle rather than its cure.

Limits

Confidence is medium. The substance of Keynes’s economics is grounded in the ingested General Theory, but the biographical detail (Cambridge, Bloomsbury, the Treasury, Bretton Woods, the earlier books) relies on widely reported standard accounts rather than the raw corpus. He is included as a non-libertarian counterpoint, summarized fairly but from the vantage of a wiki whose own commitments are Austrian.

See Also

• The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money - his foundational work
• Austrian Economics vs Keynesianism - the comparison in which he is the counterpoint
• Austrian Business Cycle Theory - the rival account of the boom-bust cycle
• Ludwig von Mises - the Austrian whose cycle theory frames the critique of Keynes
• F. A. Hayek - Keynes’s most direct contemporary antagonist on money and the cycle
• Austrian Economics vs. the Chicago School - Two free-market schools, one fault line: Friedman’s rule-bound managed money against Mises and Rothbard’s claim that managing money at all is the disease
• Say’s Law - The classical principle that production is the ultimate source of demand — goods are paid for with goods — so a general glut of everything is impossible

Sources

• The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Full Text) - Keynes’s 1936 founding text of Keynesian macroeconomics (Project Gutenberg Australia clean text)