Biography

John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge and studied economics at King's College, Cambridge University under Alfred Marshall.  From the 1930s and until at least the 1950s, Keynes was regarded by many as the most influential Western economist, because his ideas reshaped government's policies.

He is important to management because of the link with economics – Drucker classified Keynes and Schumpeter as the two most influential economists of the 20th Century. But Drucker saw Keynes's ideas as too rigid, based upon the latter's theory that the economy could be predicted, controlled and kept in equilibrium by governments lending in times of recession, and then reclaiming the lending in times of boom. Drucker maintained this was just not so, as explained in the profile of Schumpeter.

Keynes and Schumpeter had great respect for each others' intellect, but not for their economics. What Keynes never told us was how governments could borrow money when their credit rating became zero.

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