Author(s): Peter Clarke

Biography & Memoir

In the midst of our current economic crisis, we peer anxiously over the precipice into an uncertain future, and try to put things in perspective by looking to the past. One name above all keeps on cropping up; often there is a grainy picture of a tall man with thinning hair and a heavy moustache, a half-familiar figure from a former era of worldwide economic depression - an era that closed when the Second World War peremptorily intervened. The name of John Maynard Keynes first came to public attention on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 1920s, when the depression in Britain engaged his attention, with the argument that unemployment needed a radical remedy. This was a direct attack on the orthodoxy of the free-market doctrines of the day, with their reliance on the self-acting mechanisms of the Gold Standard and Free Trade to do the trick - in the long run. No, said Keynes, coining one of his most famous phrases: 'In the long run we are all dead.'