Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography [Paperback]

Donald Moggridge (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0415127114 | ISBN-13: 978-0415127110 | Publication Date: July 26, 1995 | Edition: Reprint

Based on an intimate knowledge of the subject and his environment, this biography of the most influential economist of the twentieth century traces Keynes' career on all its many levels. From academic Cambridge, to artistic Bloomsbury, to official Whitehall and to the City, we see the intellectual roots of Keynes' achievements and failures. We also see how he left his mark on the modern world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This lengthy, plodding biography is for economists, historians and other specialists and will daunt the general reader. The book draws heavily on John Maynard Keynes's 30-volume Collected Writings , which Moggridge edited, to paint a rounded picture of the English economist as monetary theorist, journalist, negotiator, confidant of politicians, diplomat, friend of the Bloomsbury circle, investor and arts administrator. An economics professor at the University of Toronto, Moggridge explains how Keynes (1883-1946) belatedly came to economics through philosophy, explores Keynes's intuitive working out of his ideas, and reviews his impact as a shaper of British financial policy and an architect of the postwar international monetary system. Keynes's marriage to Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova and his many homosexual affairs are cursorily covered in a workmanlike, massively detailed biography from which the inner man is largely absent. Photos.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

Keynes firmly believed that economists' lives were worth studying as a way of illuminating their ideas; and Donald Moggridge's monumental new biography does this quite brilliantly for `JMK' himself.
–Niall Ferguson, The Daily Mail

...in a single...volume, Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography, Canadian scholar D.E. Moggridge offers a sound, analytical, carefully researched account of the man who invented deficit spending...he sets forth the facts and issu es with precision and sharp intelligence.
–Merle Rubin, The Christian Science Monitor

[Moggridge] writes throughout with a great sureness of touch . . . combining an outsider's perspective with an instinctive insider's knowledge. It is an admirable biography . . . wise and readable.
–Roy Jenkins, The Observer

. . . a biography of Keynes that is more up-to-date and more thorough than any of its predecessors . . . the comprehensiveness of this work will insure its status as the standard academic biography of Keynes for some time.
–Choice

I have learned an enormous amount from this book. I had known Keynes well as a fellow working economist from the 1920s to the end of his life in 1945. But by the 1920s he was already the great man and confidant of senior statesmen. I had known little of his earlier life, of his relations to his Bloomsbury and Charleston friends and of them to Lydia, of how he came belatedly to economics through philosophy. Nor did I know the detail of his public life. All this Don Moggridge has been able to discover and record with very great detail and skill.
–Sir Austin Robinson, University of Cambridge

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 992 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; Reprint edition (July 26, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415127114
• ISBN-13: 978-0415127110
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #639,476 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Moggridge ignores all of Keynes's theoretical contributions, October 23, 2004

By 

Michael Emmett Brady "mandmbrady" (Bellflower, California ,United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography (Paperback)

Moggridge's(M) book on Keynes is similar in many respects to R.Skidelsky's three volume study of Keynes.Both give an excellent historical overview of the major events in Keynes's personal,professional,public and academic life.There are many interesting discussions of the interactions that occurred between Keynes and a host of famous people,politicians,philosophers and economists.The reader, who wants to buy a book on Keynes for his general library ,would do well to purchase this one volume study.On the other hand,M is not successfull in discussing and analyzing the many intellectual and scientific contributions that Keynes made to applied probability,statistics,decision theory and economics.A reader will be disappointed in this book if he wants a discussion of the intellectual heritage that Keynes bequeathed to humanity.The following is a list of the intellectual accomplishments of Keynes not mentioned by M.First,Keynes is the first scholar in history to propose an interval estimate approach for calculating an estimate of probability.Keynes gave a precise approximation technique based on the work of George Boole.These topics are covered in chapters 15 and 17 of the A Treatise on Probability(1921).Second, Keynes is the first scholar in history to provide a specific index to measure the weight of the evidence,w.w measures the completeness of the relevant ,potential evidence available to a decision maker in order to calculate an estimate of a probability.It is defined on the unit interval[0,1].Third, Keynes is the first scholar in history to specify a clearcut decision rule that incorporates non linear probability preferences and the weight(or ambiguity or uncertainty)of the evidence in his conventional coefficient of risk and weight,c.Fourth,Keynes is the first scholar in history to recognize the applied importance of Chebyshev's Inequality in specifying a lower bound to unreliable estimates based on misapplications of the normal probability distribution.Fifth,Keynes was one of the first to recognize the incorrect use of the normal probability distribution,both in the TP and in his debate with Tinbergen in 1939-1940 in the Economic Journal.These last two points still have not been understood by economists and financial analysts.Benoit Mandelbrot has presented overwhelming evidence that price movements in financial markets can't accurately be represented by a normal probability distribution.Like Tinbergen,economists keep preferring to be precisely wrong rather than generally right.Finally,Keynes specified a general theory of macroeconomics under conditions of both risk and uncertainty in his theory of effective demand presented in the GT in 1936.Letting w equal the money wage,p equalling the price level,w/p equalling the real wage,MPL equalling the marginal productivity of labor,MPC equalling the marginal propensity to spend on consumption goods,MPI equalling the marginal propensity to spend on investment goods(capital goods),Keynes derives the following:w/p=MPL/(MPC+MPI).This generalizes the classical and neoclassical theory that w/p=MPL.Classical and neoclassical theory(such as rational expectations,real business cycle theory,etc.)are special cases of Keynes's general theory that require MPC+MPI=1.Moggridge is advised to incorporate all of these intellectual accomplishments of Keynes in a revised edition.