The gods battle. We mortals hide in the bushes trying to comprehend what's going on up there. Most of the gods are very dead, of course; nonetheless there they are: John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, with Friedrich Hayek buzzing about. The postwar Keynesians like Samuelson, of the textbook, and Tobin, of the tax. Big-chested Schumpeter. Irving Fisher, still trying to make up for missing the Great Depression. The claque from Chicago, rattling their Nobels. The crisis has reanimated them, notably Keynes, who officially exited this mortal coil in 1946, leaving behind bits and pieces of what we know as Bretton Woods. Paul Krugman, who is indisputably alive, worships Keynes as a touchstone of Depression economics. Advocates of stimulus regularly light candles to him, while his ideological foes flail away, carping at "Keynesianism" (or what they believe is Keynesianism), his don-meets-boho lifestyle, his weakness for paradox and his resistance to economics as a set of mathematical problems. Others dismiss him as a relic. Then there is Robert Skidelsky, Keynes' biographer, who drags him back to explain his relevance for our times in "Keynes: The Return of the Master."
Skidelsky's guide to Keynes is thin and elegant, in contrast to his biography, which is long, at three volumes, and comprehensive. Skidelsky's triple-decker is a gripping read not only because Keynes was among the great polymaths of the past century, but because Skidelsky plants him firmly into his turbulent times. Keynes was no retiring academic, though he spent much of his life at Cambridge. He did not even consider himself -- how this dates him -- a professional economist. He was fascinated by economics, to be sure. He also liked to speculate in commodities, attend the ballet, collect Isaac Newton memorabilia, write for newspapers, gossip wickedly with his Bloomsbury pals (who viewed him with as much wonder, and anxiety, as the rest of the world) and propose solutions to giant economic problems. He was at the Versailles peace treaty, which he recognized as a disaster, then knocked off the best-selling "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" about it. Like our president, he could write. And that facility shaped his work, which, unlike nearly all world-class economists today, hung not on honing equations, but on words, observation, interpretation. As Skidelsky suggests, Keynes didn't favor words, as opposed to math, just because he liked to write; he believed that economics, a social science, couldn't be distilled into models. People, he thought, were too various, complex, changeable.
In fact it's something of a Keynesian paradox that Skidelsky's revival attempt only reminds us how foreign his age feels from ours. This isn't necessarily just about quantitative, data-rich economics, or how we no longer have gold standards or dress for dinner or even how Keynes never confronted the efficient market hypothesis or securitizations. It's also how his many-sided interests, his disdain for careerists and poseurs, fits so uneasily into our world of credentials, tenure and celebrity. He was a high-culture guy; we no longer believe in high and low, just popular. It's hard to imagine his view of M.B.A.s., thought leaders or business philosophers. And there are those paradoxes, beginning with the fact that he was a genius struck by uncertainty. Even odder, he viewed economics as a moral endeavor. He believed affluence would allow people to seek the good things in life. He spent considerable time pondering those good things, and while the philosophy remained hazy, it did not involve yachts, Gulfstreams or vacation homes. He liked money -- as a means, not an end -- and thought deeply about the love of money, about money as an abstraction.
The more you know about Keynes, the more it feels as if you are looking through the wrong end of a telescope. As even Skidelsky admits, "This doctrine [of the good life] sounds utterly alien to all but the religious, since there is now no generally accepted idea of the good life in this sense. ... Today, wealth increase is the only goal western society has to offer." (Imagine Larry Summers on the good life.) For all the denunciations of banker bonuses, Skidelsky notes, no one seems to know where the line should be drawn. We think about governance as if it were a traffic pattern or a pinball machine, aligning incentives that (hopefully) determine behavior. Keynes believed in duty, and despite bouts of arrogance and traces of fashionable anti-Semitism, his belief in individual responsibility informed his essentially prudential politics. We toss everyone into enormous markets that we assume we can control. Keynes was not as confident. "Ineradicable uncertainty" explained his fascination with and wariness of the markets. He thought people should be free -- not least from economics. We look at Keynes and his lost age and wonder: Who lived a richer life?
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