Keynes was educated at Eton, where he excelled in mathematics, and King's College, Cambridge. On graduating, he took the Civil Service examination and entered the India Office. Interested in pursuing a career in economics, Keynes presented a dissertation on probability and received a fellowship at Cambridge in 1909. Keynes taught economics at Cambridge until 1913 when he was appointed secretary to a commission to examine Indian Finance and Currency. From this experience, he published Indian Currency and Finance (1913). At the outbreak of war in 1914 and until 1918, Keynes worked for the Treasury, assisting with the finance of the British war effort. He represented the Treasury department at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1918, but resigned on the grounds that the proposals for German war reparations were unfair and impractical. The following year he published his opinions in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which firmly denounced the Treaty of Versailles. He returned to Cambridge and in 1921 published his controversial Treatise on Probability. This was followed in 1923 by his Tract on Monetary Reform. Throughout the 1920's, he contributed numerous papers and essays on pubic policies to leading publications.
In 1931, Keynes published Treatise on Money which again led to controversy in economic quarters. His greatest work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, appeared in 1936 and was both successful and revolutionary. It firmly established Keynes as one of the 20th century's greatest economists. By 1938, Keynes' health began to deteriorate and his writing became less frequent. At the outbreak of World War II, Keynes was back at Treasury and in 1940 published How to Pay for the War. He also led the British delegation to the 1944 Bretton Woods economic summit, which resulted in the formation of the Internation Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (IBRD). Keynes was a prolific writer and contributed numerous papers, essays, etc, to The Listener, The Times, The New Statesman and other periodicals. His other best-known works include The Economic Consequences of Mr. Chruchill (1925), A Short View of Russia (1925), The End of Laissez-Faire (1926). Essays in Persuasion (1931), A Monetary Theory of Production (1933), Fluctuations in Net Investment in the United States (1936) and Relative Movements of Real Wages and Output (1939). |
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