Books and other Resources about Keynes

>John Maynard Keynes was a British economist whose ideas have profoundly affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, as well as the economic policies of governments. He advocated the use of fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, as well as its various offshoots.

In the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, overturning the older ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would in the short to medium term automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. Keynes instead argued that aggregate demand determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. Keynes’s influence waned in the 1970s, partly as a result of problems that began to afflict the Anglo-American economies from the start of the decade, and partly because of critiques from Milton Friedman and other economists who were pessimistic about the ability of governments to regulate the business cycle with fiscal policy.

Quotes attributed to John Maynard Keynes:

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.

I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.

Ideas shape the course of history.

If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.

In the long run we are all dead.

It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.

Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated.

Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.

The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems – the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.

The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.

The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.

There is no harm in being sometimes wrong – especially if one is promptly found out.

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking