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John Maynard Keynes, detail of a watercolour by Gwen Raverat, about 1908; in the National Portrait &elipsis; [Credit: Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London](born June 5, 1883, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Eng.—died April 21, 1946, Firle, Sussex) British economist, known for his revolutionary theories on the causes of prolonged unemployment. The son of the distinguished economist John Neville Keynes (1852–1949), he served in the British treasury during World War I and attended the Versailles Peace Conference. He resigned in protest over the Treaty of
Versailles, denouncing its provisions in
The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), and he returned to teaching at the University of Cambridge. The international economic crisis of the 1920s and '30s prompted him to write
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1935–36), the most influential economic treatise of the 20th century.
It refuted laissez-faire economic theories, arguing that the treatment for economic depression was either to enlarge private investment or to create public substitutes for private investment. Keynes argued that in mild economic downturns, monetary policy in the form of easier credit and lower interest rates might stimulate investment. More severe crises called for deliberate public deficits (&see; deficit financing), either in the shape of public works or subsidies to the poor and unemployed. Keynes's theories were put into practice by many Western democracies, notably by the U.S. in the New Deal. Interested in the design of new international financial institutions at the end of World War II, Keynes was active at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944.
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