Who is John Maynard Keynes？

John Maynard Keynes was a great inspiration to the economics profession, because at a critical time, which was the 1930s, when with the onset of the stock market crash and the Great Depression, he saw very little correspondence between orthodox theory and the challenges that society faced. What Keynes did as a leader and as a very strong and independent mind was step forward with a different vision in his book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, and try to recreate how we perceived what was happening in the economy and what society, meaning policymakers, could do about it. Keynes was very, very courageous, and at some level, his tactic was to be controversial. He really wrote with great vitriol and great color and criticized people, including Alfred Marshall, who had been one of his great teachers, not because of lack of affection, but because he was trying to shake us out of the habits of mind that Marshall had ingrained in generations of economists. I think Keynes was the biggest break from prevailing ideology and tradition, and it came at the time of tremendous dysfunction and crisis. In the 1930s, as the British economy and the world economy was heading into the Depression, he is the person who most powerfully articulated that the correspondence between orthodox theory and the challenges that society faced was hugely divergent. And what you see in Keynes is a man who had the courage and the energy to step forward and construct a new vision that much better explained the reality that was underfoot. When we look forward to the current period, Keynes is a beacon. It's kind of a call to action at this point in time when our theories have failed us so much. But more important than the literal things that he said, because the economic structure is so different today, it's the example he set of courage and vitality and imagination, stepping forward in a crisis, is exactly what we're looking for and hoping to inspire. That's why INET is launching its conference, not to validate Keynesian theory, but it's launching at Keynes College in Cambridge in order to invigorate everyone as a call to action that we again, in this dysfunctional period, need to reinvent our perceptions of the economy.