John Maynard Keynes – författare

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.