John Maynard Keynes: The Gay Economist
‘œIt’s taken a new banking crisis to dust off Keynes and give him his rightful due.’ ‘“ Newser
The economic theories of John Maynard Keynes are back in vogue since President-elect Obama identified how his administration plans to respond to the economic crisis. Keynesian ideas encourage government to step in and kick-start the economy when the private sector has failed. Apparently, the old administration had a thing for Keynes too.
Last week, Adam Davidson had an interesting segment on NPR where you can get the gist of Keynes economic theories. In this report, I also learned that Keynes was gay:
Some 63 years after his death, British economist John Maynard Keynes is enjoying a resurgence of popularity. Keynes’ theories were considered radical in their time, but are now at the heart of the incoming administration’s thinking on how to respond to the U.S. economic crisis.
As NPR’s Adam Davidson tells Renee Montagne, Keynes was a man of many contradictions. A graduate of Cambridge and Eton, he was part of England’s elite social class. But he was also a shocking figure ‘” for instance, he was openly gay.
‘œHe would bring his boyfriends to dinner parties and talk about being married to them,’ Davidson said.
Gawker beat NPR to the punch and asked, ‘œCan This Gay Sex Maniac Fix the Economy?‘
Barack Obama’s economic team, in particular, will be looking to Keynesian economics for a way out of the current crisis. But did you know he was a ravenous sex fiend who obsessively recorded each and every one of his hot gay hookups? It’s true! And his secret second sex diary is in code!
Keynes had one sex diary to record who he had secret gay sex. The second one is more mysterious’¦
Sex diaries and economic theories’¦ who knew they went hand in hand? That said, what does being gay have to do with his work? The Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, & Queer Culture thinks his homosexuality is relevant and here’s why:
The achievements of Keynes’s life and thought are most evident in his three major works: The Economic Consequences of the Peace, The Treatise on Probability (1921), and The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
His work on probability was rooted in his suspicion of the confusion between the statistical norm and the ethical norm, and of the use of the idea of the long-run to justify unfair or unrealistic policies. The fallacious faith that European societies would automatically return to their pre-war prosperity in the long-run underlay the book on the economic consequences of the Versailles treaty.
In The General Theory Keynes demolishes the belief that unfettered markets will provide enough jobs and adequate national incomes to guarantee the future of capitalism.
The force of each work rests on Keynes’s rejection of the belief that ethically acceptable outcomes will result from the operation of long-run ‘œstatistically’ predictable social behavior.
It may well be that Keynes’s experience as a homosexual gave him a depth of psychological and ethical insight that permitted him an awareness of and concern for those whose welfare is excluded from the dominant social thinking of European and North American societies.
Although he married and ostensibly lived heterosexually for the second half of his life, there is no doubt that homosexual life, together with its emotional and aesthetic sensibility, deeply shaped Keynes’s personality. The creativity and daring of his intellectual life–particularly his ability to take unconventional stands and his skepticism towards widely-held illusions–were informed by his experience as a homosexual.
So what do you think: can this gay economist save the world?
Photo credit: stock.xchng.
I don’t know about his economic theories, but now I’m intrigued to read his secret sex diaries. Me-ow!
I think it’s more likely he’s destroying it rather than saving it. After all, the Federal Reserve’s easy money policies that caused the credit bubble were effectively Keynesian stimulus that was used to delay the previous recession – for a few years anyway. From http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0113edit2jan13,0,5177292.story
—
John Cochrane, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, says that among academics over the last 30 years, the idea of fiscal stimulus has been discredited and in graduate courses, it is “taught only for its fallacies.”
New York University economist Thomas Sargent agrees: “The calculations that I have seen supporting the stimulus package are back-of-the-envelope ones that ignore what we have learned in the last 60 years of macroeconomic research.”
—
Unfortunately, you are correct in that the last administration followed largely Keynesian economic policies, and we appear to be posed for more of the same. Change? Not on the economic front.
Only the milton friedman devotees at the University of Chicago School of Economics championed the anti-Keynesian epidemic which lead to reaganomics and thatcherism, AND which, of course, have since been completely discredited and abandoned by rational economists, including Nobel winner, Paul Krugman. The days of friedman and conservative economic theory are thankfully OVER AND DONE WITH.