John Maynard Keynes - Böcker

1936 publicerades århundradets mest uppmärksammade bok i ämnet nationalekonomi, ”The General Theorry of Employment, Interest and Money”. I den angrep John Maynard Keynes arbetslöshetsproblemet och penning- och finanspolitiken på ett nytt sätt. Han menade att marknaden inte kunde lösa sysselsättningsproblemet och att staten måste ingripa med lågräntepolitik och offentliga investeringar. Boken har diskuterats livligt alltsedan den kom ut, och den tycks ständigt få ny aktualitet. Detta är den första kompletta svenska utgåvan. Lars Herlitz har skrivit en utförlig orienterande inledning.

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) is perhaps the foremost economic thinker of the twentieth century. On economic theory, he ranks with AdamSmith and Karl Marx; and his impact on how economics was practiced, from the Great Depression to the 1970s, was unmatched.The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was first published in 1936. But its ideas had been forming for decades ? asa student at Cambridge, Keynes had written to a friend of his love for 'Free Trade and free thought'. Keynes's limpid style, concise prose, andvivid descriptions have helped to keep his ideas alive - as have the novelty and clarity, at times even the ambiguity, of his macroeconomic vision. He was troubled, above all, by high unemployment rates and largedisparities in wealth and income. Only by curbing both, he thought, could individualism, ‘the most powerful instrument to better the future', be safeguarded. The twenty-first century may yet prove him right.In The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Keynes elegantly and acutely exposes the folly of imposing austerity on a defeated and struggling nation.

In the light of subsequent history, Essays in Persuasion is a remarkably prophetic volume covering a wide range of issues in political economy. In articles on the Versailles Treaty. John Maynard Keynes foresaw all too clearly that excessive Allied demands for reparations and indemnities would lead to the economic collapse of Germany. In Keynes's essays on inflation and deflation, the reader can find ideas that were to become the foundations of his most renowned treatise, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). With startling accuracy Keynes forecast the economic fluctuations that were to beset the economies of Europe and the United States and even proposed measures which, if heeded at the time, might have warded off an era of world-wide depression. His views on Soviet Russia, on the decline of laissez-faire, and the possibilities of economic growth are as relevant today as when Keynes originally set them forth.

John Maynard Keynes, then a rising young economist, participated in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 as chief representative of the British Treasury and advisor to Prime Minister David Lloyd George. He resigned after desperately trying and failing to reduce the huge demands for reparations being made on Germany. The Economic Consequences of the Peace is Keynes' brilliant and prophetic analysis of the effects that the peace treaty would have both on Germany and, even more fatefully, the world. A popular lecturer of economics at Cambridge University and editor of the Economic Journal, Keynes made The Economic Consequences of the Peace a major step in his career. It was translated into a dozen languages and sold 100,000 copies in six months. Taken seriously even by those who were opposed to his claims, the book helped lift economics to a new, higher level of recognition and acceptance.This volume, with its insightful portraits of Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, and Woodrow Wilson, remains one of the great works of political economy of our time. In a penetrating introduction written for this new edition, David Felix explores Keynes' reasons for writing the book, analyzes the author's arguments, and paints an historical backdrop of the period during which it was written.

Once the urgent problems of reparations, which had deeply troubled Keynes at the Peace Conference at Versailles, were on their way towards solution, Keynes turned to the equally grave problems of the currencies of Europe and their adjustment to the post-war world. These issues had been discussed in the series of Reconstruction Supplements of the Manchester Guardian Commercial that he had edited during 1922. In the Tract Keynes drew heavily on his own contributions to that series. This edition makes available the variations between the texts. The Tract remains of interest in three respects. First, it shows the state of Keynes's thinking about monetary problems and the causes of inflation in the early 1920s. Second, it provides one of the clearest expositions ever written of the determination of forward exchange rates. Third, it shows Keynes already favouring flexible exchange rates as a means of allowing independence in national economic policy.

This volume, the fourth of six dealing with the Second World War, is concerned with the origins of what became the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It traces the origins of the ideas involved, the process of argument and redrafting that occurred in Whitehall and the subsequent, primarily Anglo-American, negotiations themselves. It takes the story up to the Joint Bretton Woods Conference. As it contains copies of all drafts of Keynes's Clearing Union proposals, together with extensive sampling of discussions with economists such as Dennis Robertson, James Meade, Roy Harrod and Harry White, it combines the presentation of a set of ideas of continuing relevance with essential background material on the origins of an important post-war international institution.

Between the outbreak of war in 1939 and his death in April 1946, Keynes was closely involved in the management of Britain's war economy and the planning of the post-war world. This volume, the fifth of six dealing with this period, focuses on three aspects of his activities in planning the post-war world: the final stages of the discussions and negotiations that brought the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to birth at Bretton Woods and Savannah, the negotiations over commercial policy, and the discussions on reparations and the post-war treatment of Germany. On all of these subjects it contains Keynes's attempts to influence, often with success, the course of events in both Britain and America.

This volume brings together Keynes's attempts to influence public opinion and policy concerning primarily British affairs between 1922 and 1929. During this period, his major concerns were Britain's attempt to return to the gold standard and its consequences, industrial policy (especially in the cotton textile industry) and unemployment policy, although he became briefly involved in many other subjects. Most of the volume consists of Keynes's journalism for the period, but it also contains his previously unpublished evidence to official committees, anonymous contributions to The Nation and Athenaeum and related correspondence.

Keynes's first book, published in 1913, was Indian Currency and Finance. He had served briefly from 1906 to 1908 in the India Office in Whitehall; then as the administrative link between the Government of India and the British parliament. He quickly became involved in the problems of the Indian currency and the then important and fascinating issues concerning the gold-exchange standard. He continued to work on these problems, with the encouragement and help of his former colleagues, after he had returned to Cambridge. The book which resulted, and his known mastery of the problems involved, led to Keynes's first major incursion into public life as a member of the (Austen Chamberlain) Royal Commission on Indian Finance and Currency. The important contributions he made to its work are recorded in detail in Volume 15 of this series, which forms a complement to this volume.

This volume brings together Keynes's attempts to influence the course of public opinion and public policy in Britain and elsewhere between the autumn of 1929 and Britain's departure from the gold standard on 21 September 1931. At its centre are Keynes's activities as a member of the Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry (including the eight days of 'private evidence' he gave, setting out the theory of his then unpublished Treatise on Money and applying it to Britain's contemporary problems) and the Economic Advisory Council and its committees. It also includes all his related journalism and his correspondence both with senior politicians and with other men of affairs. As such, it is a companion to the volumes dealing with the development of his more formal economic theory during these years, most notably A Treatise on Money.

Most of the essays in this book were first collected together in October 1931, immediately after Britain had left the gold standard. They reflected Keynes's attempts over the previous dozen years to influence public opinion and policy over the Treaty of Versailles, over which he had resigned from the Treasury in June 1919, reparations and inter-allied war debts, stabilisation policy, the gold standard and the shape of liberal politics in Britain. In 1972 the essays were reprinted with the full texts of the pamphlets - Can Lloyd George Do It?, The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill, A Short View of Russia and The End of Laissez Faire. At that time, the full texts of his two post-1931 pamphlets - The Means to Prosperity and How to Pay for the War - were added. The book contains examples of Keynes's finest writing on economic policy and politics. This edition includes an introduction by Donald Moggridge.

From 1915, when Keynes joined the Treasury, until he resigned in 1919 during the Versailles Conference, he carried a rapidly increasing load of responsibility. This volume prints all the principal papers and memoranda he wrote during those years and throws new light on the crises of inter-allied financial relations and the near exhaustion of British financial resources. It contains also his contributions to the early thinking in the Treasury about post-war reparations and inter-allied debts. It ends with his correspondence, official and private, from Paris, as he saw his hopes of a wise settlement vanishing. This is a necessary companion to The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Volume 2 in this series).

During the winter of 1975-6, the Keynes family unexpectedly discovered another collection of Keynes's papers at Tilton, his Sussex house. In this was a substantial amount of material relating to the composition and defence of the General Theory, including many more early drafts. This volume brings together these papers, along with a few others that have come to light since the publication of Volumes 13 and 14 of this series in 1973. It is a necessary companion to these volumes and their chronicle of intellectual development and achievement.

This volume brings together Keynes's writings in a number of fields. It includes a full account of his experience as an investor, both for himself and for others, combined with a selection from his correspondence and memoranda on investment in which he tried to expound his beliefs to others. Also included are his writings on commodities, his early lecture notes on money and a selection of his correspondence as editor of the Economic Journal and a referee for the Macmillan Company.