John Maynard Keynes: Can the great economist save the world?

Revered in his day, John Maynard Keynes was later pilloried as a dinosaur of big-state meddling by Margaret Thatcher and her fellow free marketeers. But now, as untrammelled capitalism implodes once more, people are asking: could the great economist's ideas really save the world?

By Nick Fraser
Saturday, 8 November 2008

Some years ago, I was present when Bill Clinton visited Warwick University, during the dying days of his presidency. The faculty were awkwardly lined up, each of them holding a book as a gift. I noticed that Big Bill wasn't excessively interested in geology, and he didn't do much better with Germaine Greer and her volume of women's poetry. Things were different when he encountered Robert Skidelsky, author of the definitive Maynard Keynes biography. "Keynes!" the President exclaimed, as if recalling a long-lost crony. He told us all how he had always loved the boldness of the man.

"Keynes had the idea of using government money to spend your way out of a depression," the President explained. "That was a major discovery." I realised that Clinton, like myself certainly, had come to comprehend capitalism through the work of Maynard Keynes. And Keynes, like FDR, whom he met and admired, had been right. There really was nothing to fear, least of all fear. Humans need not think of themselves as victims of impersonal economic laws, suffering stoically. With luck, and the due exercise of brilliance, we could learn to save ourselves. Who knows, we might even come to fathom the "dismal science" of economics.