John Maynard Keynes

About John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes ( KAYNZ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946), was an English economist whose writings are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, as well as its various offshoots. Originally trained in mathematics, he built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles. His ideas, reformulated as New Keynesianism, are fundamental to mainstream macroeconomics. He is known as the "father of macroeconomics" and is one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. Keynes was educated at King's College at the University of Cambridge, where he graduated in 1904 with a B.A. in mathematics. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, challenging the ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands.