Chatting with A Dead Economist: J.M. Keynes, The Patron Saint of the Central Planner10/08/2025
Mises Wire
C.J. Maloney
“Keynes was not a democrat, but, rather, looked upon himself as a potential member of an enlightened ruling elite.”—James Buchanan and Richard Wagner (1977)
That “we are all Keynesians now” is a long-established fact and, if you had ever met the man himself, chances are you would have liked him. Baron John Maynard Keynes is not only the most famed and influential economist of our time; he was probably the most likeable one of his era. A Cambridge-trained mathematician, Keynes was gregarious, generous to friends, a superb conversationalist and of undoubted genius, but after reading his magnum opus, The General Theory, I must (reluctantly) confess to being—from an economic point of view—unimpressed. I realize this condemns me to the lunatic fringe so all I can do is apologize and point to what is written.
Keynes opens the book with, “the ideas which are here expressed so laboriously are extremely simple” and that is God’s honest truth. Once you journey through almost 400 bloated pages and climb piles of mathematical formulas, the book is but a simple call for inflation—the same that’s been heard repeatedly since the dawn of monetary history. The “Keynesian Revolution” this book kicked off merely dug up a corpse and declared it a newborn baby; it’s not so much an economic treatise as it is a policy proposal for inflation since “there is no remedy but to persuade the public that green cheese is practically the same thing [as money] and to have a green cheese factory (i.e. a central bank) under public control.” Being published in the midst of the Great Depression made the book’s promise “if money could be grown like a crop or manufactured like a motor-car, depressions would be avoided” utterly irresistible, so The General Theory was greeted with hosannas.
Be warned, The General Theory has a well-deserved reputation for being a notoriously difficult book to get through because Keynes forgot that a writer’s primary duty is clarity. The book reads as if written by someone who tried to learn but never quite mastered the English language and it doesn’t help that Keynes’s style of writing is best described using the sales clerk from Chekov’s story Three Years, the one who “liked to obscure his speech with bookish words, which he understood in his own way, and there were many ordinary words that he often employed in a sense other than the one they had.”
The book is so sloppily written that Keynes too often seems to confuse himself. For instance, arguing that savings and investment are “two essentially different activities” but later pointing out that they are “merely different aspects of the same thing.” The book is full of such reversals that make you furrow your brow, but it does provide the occasional belly laugh, such as when he talks about how “catastrophe such as war or earthquake” destroys capital then later argues that, “Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth.”
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Source:
https://mises.org/mises-wire/chatting-dead-economist-jm-keynes-patron-saint-central-planner
