EconomistsEconomistsCreated 4/30/1996
Go to Brad DeLong's Home
Page
Sir Alec Cairncross on John Maynard Keynes, from The Economist of
April 20-26, 1996 (pp. 75-6).
It must be left to posterity to say how great a man Keynes was. But what posterity will never know... is the charm of the man, the devastating brilliance of his conversation, the quickness of his intuition, his ready generosity, or the unsparing devotion to the public interest that finally killed him.
My first meeting with Keynes took place in Dennis Robertson's room in
Trinity College, almost as soon as I got to Cambridge early in October 1932.
A group of dons, most of whom I had never seen, had gathered for tea when
Keynes entered and I listened overawed to the subsequent discussion. Much
of it dealt with pig rearing in the Soviet Union and the problems of artificial
insemination in breeding--not a subject to which I could contribute, but
one on which Keynes was full of information. The sequel, so far as I was
concerned, was an invitation to join the first meeting of Keynes's club.
This met in his rooms on Monday nights after hall and consisted largely
of undergraduates who had been brought to his notice; a few dons, visiting
economists, and a graduate student or two also attended. It was the one
way in which Keynes's interest in, and kindness towards, young economists
found expression. He cam down from london for the weekend to fulfil his
bursarial duties, stayed on to lecture and preside over his "club"
in the evening, returning to London next morning. A paper would be read,
sometimes by a don or a visitor or occasionally by Keynes himself, sometimes
by an undergraduate or graduate student.
After everyone had their say, Keynes summed up: and one could be sure that
he would have some new and penetrating reflections. There were also times
when he interjected a comment on what had just been said. In a discussion
on Roosevelt's policies, someone remarked that Rexford Tugwell, a member
of the president's "Brains Trust", could not make up his mind
and was sitting on a razor's edge. "Then there will soon be two Tugwells,"
said Keynes.
I read two papes to the club, both of them on home and foreign investment,
and used the first occasion to introduce a Ltain version of the limerick
on the young lady of Niger, curious to observe how Keynes would react to
such frivolity. Keynes remained entirely impassive, and made no comment
then or later, preferring to concentrate his remarks at the end on the way
in which studies of investment seemed always to be couched in terms of gross
investment, with no mention of the net amount.
From 1932 to 1934 I heard Keynes lecture, on Mondays at noon in the Michaelmas
term. There was an audience of about 100 drawn not only from students of
economics but from other disciplines and countries, all curious to observe
his style of lecturing and absorb his ideas. At that time he was rehearsing
what would find its way eventually into The General Theory, his chief
work.
He had a resonant and melodious voice, lecturing conversationally in a matter-of-fact
way without gestures. The argument was developed lucidly and systematically,
assisted by an occasional witticism, doses of what he called "symbolic
arithmetic" and once in a while be reflections on one of his predecessors
or be a flight into philosophic speculation. I remember particularly a lecture
in 1933 when he tried to convey how new ideas were born. Never did they
arrive, he said, with the hard edges that later critics came to attribute
to them when trying to define their terms. Ideas were apt to be like fluffy
balls of wool with no fixed outline, and the relationship between concepts
when first perceived was likely to be equally woolly. Keynes mistrusted
intellectual rigor of the Ricardian type as likely to get in the way of
original thinking, and saw that it was not uncommon to hit on a valid conclusion
before finding a logical path to it.
Of my immediate contacts with Keynes in those years what comes most readily
to my mind is the lunch to which Bryon Hopkin and I were invited as sole
guests early in 1935. Our conversation happened to elicit from him an account
of his method of writing. "I don't really start", he said, "until
I get my proofs back from the printer. Then I can begin serious writing."
There was talk then of Bagehot, partly because I had quoted the Victorian
as saying: "John Bull can stand many things, but he can't stand 2%,"
and Keynes wanted to know the source. When I commented on Bagehot's sagacity,
Keynes replied: "It was native to him. He had a feel for the way things
work."
As a pupil of Keynes I naturally look back on him chiefly as a man of ideas,
and it will be for his ideas that he will be longest remembered. Although
he wrote extensively on monetary theory and inflation, especially in his
early years, it was the problem of unemployment that came to dominate his
thinking. In the 1930s he saw unemployment in terms of a deficiency of demand,
for which additional government investment and cheaper credit were the obvious
cures. Even when, in the post-war world, excess demand became the more usual
state of affairs, his prescription of demand management remained appropriate,
although pushed far beyond the 5% level of unemployment that he had taken
to represent full employment. As he had foreseen, inflation was aggravated
by the steady rise in money wages--posing a problem to which he had no solution
and one that he regarded as political rather than economic.
What he could not have foreseen were the many other problems that have arisen,
associated not with a failure of demand but with the international flow
of capital and rapid structural change affectin the demand for labour of
different kinds in a labour market itself undergoing rapid change. It would
be absurd to suppose that Keynes, who never said the same thing for long,
would fail to make entirely new proposals after 50 years.
EconomistsCreated 4/30/1996
Go to Brad DeLong's Home
Page
Associate Professor of Economics Brad De
Long, 601 Evans
University of California at Berkeley; Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
(510) 643-4027 phone (510) 642-6615 fax
delong@econ.berkeley.edu
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/