Customer Reviews (3)

Nectar and Ambrosia for the Liberal Economist
To the interested layperson John Mayanrd Keynes is known as a villain/genius responsible for the theory of governmental deficit spending in a time of economic crises. This book in a concise and understandable manner, without recourse to ponderous mathematical formulas, makes a very convincing case for the necessity of governmental intervention.
When people are unwilling to spend and are hoarding cash, it is up to government to inject money into the system by means of expansionary monetary policy, either it is public works in the most dramatic case or reduced interest rates, intended to stimulate investment in a more commonplace scenario.
Fiscal prudence or austerity will not lift the economy out of the slump, for a very simple reason; if everyone is saving and no one is buying, then no one is able to sell and economy is pushed further into a recession.
Villilfied by countless conservatives as an endorsement of governmental intervention and subsequent domination of the people, the ideas proposed in the book are accepted by such respected institutions as the Federal Reserve and merit attention of a person, who would like to claim general economic awareness.
Apart from the the discussion on public spending, there are highly informative essays on German hyperinflation of the 1920s, ruminations on Gold standard and much more; all presented with great clarity and humor, that few if any economists have mangaged to imitate.

When conservatives could still face socialism eye-to-eye.
Writing during the nineteen twenties and thirties, when the specter of socialism didn't yet haunt the Anglo-Saxon ruling elites, Keynes didn't feel his duty to sing eulogies to the free market; on the contrary, he felt his duty as an economist to propose ways through which modern society could supersede the "centrality of the money motive". The essays devoted to problems of politics in this collection, specially "A short view of Russia", "Economic perspectives for our grandchildren" and "Am I a Liberal?" are among the best things written from the liberal-conservative viewpoint on the ideological choices of our age. A must-read.

Exquisite mandarin prose and clear argument
John Maynard Keynes at his most beguiling. A series of essays that have not lost their power despite the passage of 70 years or so.As a prose stylist Maynard Keynes could equal his friends Virginia Woolf and E.M.Forster, and he does so in this volume.Perhaps the apogee of essaywriting of the Oxford/Cambridge type, this volume has a charm that isabsent from his longer works (General Theory, Tract on Monetary Reform,even the Economic Consequences of the Peace). For those people interestedin hard edged macro theory, read elsewhere.For admirers of logic andclarity and the British tradition of enlightened common sense, Eureka! Youhave found it in this book. ... Read more

Book Description
In 1936 Keynes published the most provocative book written by any economist of his generation. Arguments about the book continued until his death in 1946 and still continue today. This new edition, published 70 years after the original, features a new introduction by Paul Krugman which discusses the significance and continued relevance of The General Theory. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (42)

Please remember...
You must all please remember that Keynes was first-and-foremost a socialist.His overall goal in creating his theories was to "prove" that socialist economic theories could function in the world of the early 20th century.Read Keynes thru this screen, and you'll understand what he's attempting (unsuccessfully) to do.

I gave this book a 5 star rating for the following reason:if you can overcome it's dryness and reliance on theories of little substance, you will see that socialism at large is truely bunk.(having been educated formally in Keynsian theory, disproving it, and all it's socialist correlaries, is a passion of mine)Please remember as you read this; if socialism and Keynesian economics was a viable theory for governments to function, the governments of the entire old eastern communist block would still be alive and functioning in their pre-1992 forms, and quasi-socialist countries the world over would be growing ever larger than the US economy once they've moved out of their manufacturing based economies and joined us in competing with other service based economies. (They have not been able to effectively compete beyond certain stages of growth)

Keynes' theory doesn't work.His own writings are more theory and fantasy than reality.

The Hobo Philosopher
This is not the book for the beginner. Unless you know economics and economic terminology save this book for some time down the road.
Keynes did not write for the general reader. He was clearly an elitist economist. He may know what he is talking about but I doubt that you will. I didn't.
His "A Tract on Monetary Reform" is a little more intelligible but not much. He is obviously not a teacher and isn't trying to be one. Try Galbraith, Heilbroner, Samuelson, or William Greider or anybody else first.
If you think you know your economics and you are looking for a challenge - this is your man.

seminal, but inscrutable for the average Joe
Published in 1936 during the height of the the Great Depression, Keynes's "General Theory" is widely credited, rightly or wrongly, as being the theory that actually pointed out how to end the Depression.It has never been out of print since its first publication.

The volume you're getting here hasn't much in terms of being "reader friendly."There is a brief (2-page) introduction.There are no footnotes (other than Keynes's original ones), and no helpful commentary or other aid that would help make Keynes's book more comprehensible to the general reader.So you're basically getting the bare bones.

But the book can be very tough going, even for those with extensive preparation in economics.It has plenty of nasty equations and there are more thistles than you'll find in an English hedgerow. In brief, it's one of those universally heralded classics that many pay lip service to but few have ever read.

As for whether this is "the book that ended the Depression," I'm not so sure.There were many competing theories floating around during the Depression, and Keynes's was only one of those.

While Keynes's recipe of counteracting a decline in private spending with an increase in government spending turned out to be what Roosevelt (and Hitler) actually did, certainly the war would have come along whether or not Keynes published his book.Hence governments would have stumbled upon "the Keynesian solution" on their own anyway.

The Failure of the "New Economics"
Henry Hazlitt,

"A Path-Breaking Pioneer?

Now though I have analyzed Keynes's General Theory in the following pages theorem by theorem, chapter by chapter, and sometimes even sentence by sentence, to what to some readers may appear a tedious length, I have been unable to find in it a single important doctrine that is both true and original. What is original in the book is not true; and what is true is not original. In fact, as we shall find, even much that is fallacious in the book is not original, but can be found in a score of previous writers."

If you haven't read this masterpiece at least twice
...you're not a real person. If it was not for this wizard's brilliant insight on how to create prosperity with a little math and a little monetary expansion, there would undoubtedly still be poverty in the world today.It's not just a book, it's a religion. And it's the best religion.

Verdict: Read it at least twice. ... Read more

Book Description
In THE END OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE (1926), Keynes presents a brief historical review of laissez-faire economic policy. Though he agrees in principle that the marketplace should be free of government interference, he suggests that government can play a constructive role in protecting individuals from the worst harms of capitalism's cycles, especially as concerns unemployment. When the Great Depression struck a few years later, this work seemed very prescient.

Keynes first earned widespread prominence immediately following World War I, when he published THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE in 1919. This book gained a good deal of notoriety because of its withering portraits of both French premier Georges Clemenceau and US president Woodrow Wilson. Keynes criticized the Allied victors for signing a treaty that would have ruinous consequences for Europe, if not modified as he suggested. Unfortunately, few leaders appreciated Keynes's criticisms, and he saw his worst fears realized in the rise of Hitler and the devastation of World War II.

Keynes's brilliant mind and lucid writing are evident on every page. Both of these works are well worth reading for his profound knowledge of economics. ... Read more

Book Description
Robert Skidelsky’s three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes has been acclaimed as the authoritative account of the great economist-statesman’s life. Here, Skidelsky has revised and abridged his magnum opus into one definitive book, which examines in its entirety the intellectual and ideological journey that led an extraordinarily gifted young man to concern himself with the practical problems of an age overshadowed by war. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, John Maynard Keynes offers a sympathetic account of the life and influences of a passionate visionary and an invaluable insight into the economic philosophy that still remains at the center of political and economic thought. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A fitting tribute to one of the greatest thinkers of all time
Anyone who has taken a course in macroeconomics knows who Keynes is. Economics is full of camps, conflicting doctrines, feuds, rivalries, etc. Keynes was unique in that, unlike other economists who are indoctrinated or are in love with a theory, he was never scared of giving up an idea that did not work. If one was to read his "Tract on Monetary Reform" one might be fooled into thinking that it was Milton Friedman that was writing and not the J.M Keynes who revolutionized economic thought with his General Theory. This pragmatism is what sets Keynes apart from every other economist. But why Keynes was so different from others is something students never learn. This biography does an admirable job of tracing Keynes' upbringing, his education, career, and contributions in the light of circumstances that Keynes lived through and shaped his ideas. It is also full of nuggets about Keynes' idiosyncracies which humanizes the biography and shows the real person behind the aura. The book is long, but 63 years of action-packed life requires such detail. The Chinese say, May we live in interesting times. Keynes certainly lived in interesting times with the result that this book is just as interesting.

An excellent,nontechnical biography of J M Keynes
This book is Skidelsky's one volume abridged version of his previous three volume biography(1983,1992,2000)on J M Keynes.Skidelsky successfully weaves all of the different aspects and strands(personal,familial,historical,social,political,economic) of Keynes's life into a beautifully constructed historical tapestry that will keep the reader's attention from the first page to the last.All of the different talents Keynes possessed and displayed during his lifetime come alive on the pages of this book.Skidelsky is the master of his material as long as he concentrates on the vast nontechnical aspects of the life of his subject.Skidelsky has clearlymastered the historical and chronological events and interrelationships that occurred during Keynes's life.Unfortunately,Skidelsky does not have the necessary formal training in mathematics,logic,statistics or probability in order to properly understand or assess any of those parts of Keynes's scholarship that involves the use of formal logical and mathematicalmethods or analysis.These technical deficiencies in Skidelsky'sacademic training arethe maindefect,not only in this book but in the entire corpus of Skidelsky's writings on Keynes going back over 30 years.I will concentrate on Skidelsky's error filled statements concerning Keynes's A Treatise on Probability(1921;TP) and the logical theory of probability.On p.95,Skidelsky conflates the principle of indifference(poi) with the principle of insufficient reason.They are not the same.Keynes's poi requires a balance or symmetry of the relevant,available evidence or factors involved before equiprobabilities are assigned.The poi can't be applied if there is no relevant evidence.Advocates of the principle of insufficient reason,on the other hand, argue that equiprobabilities can be applied in states where no relevant evidence exists.Keynes always rejected this kind of reasoning.Skidelsky bases his assessment of Keynes's logical theory of probability on the error filled work of A. Carabelli and R.O'Donnell.Carabelli and O'Donnell base their assessments of the TP on four sources:1)Keynes's introductory guide to the measurement of probability in chapter III of the TP;2)F. Ramsey's 1922 book review of the TP in The Cambridge Magazine;3)F.Ramsey's 1926 book review of the TP in his article,"Truth and Probability",published in 1931 in a book of articles;and 4)Keynes's 4 page eulogy and very brief review of the book in 1931.In chapter III,Keynes had already made it clear to the alert reader,who had a mind of his/her own (and would not ape the preposterous ,nonsensical claims made by F. Ramsey that by nonnumerical and nonmeasurable Keynes meant that numbers could not be used in general to estimate probabilities,i.e.,that Keynesian probabilities were like a surveyor assigning nonnumerical heights to a mountain hidden in the mist)that the vast majority of Keynesian probabilities used in common discourse were/are interval estimates.John Maynard Keynes is the originator and founder of the interval estimate approach to probability.Keynes spells it out in a number of places in the TP:"...we judge that the probability of the actual argument lies between these two(numbers;reviewers note).Since our standards,therefore,are referred to numerical measures in many cases where actual measurement is impossible,and since the probability lies BETWEEN(Keynes's emphasis)two numerical measures..."(1921,p.32).After warning the reader not to reach any conclusions based on chapter III alone until after Part II of the TP was reached(p.37),Keynes gives his definition of nonnumerical in chapter 15 of Part II on p.160 of the TP.On pp.161-163 and pp.186-194(ch.17),Keynes presents his approximation approach .It has nothing to do with ordinal rankings(see Skidelsky's queer claims on pp.284-285,for instance).An upper bound and a lower bound are specified for some 13 worked out probability problems.One of these problems(a revision of Boole's problem 10)is then made the foundation for Part III of the TP.Part III is then made the logical foundation for Part V. Carabelli's and O'Donnell's "reading" of Keynes's TP is very poor,at best.Skidelsky's conclusions,based on their very poor reading,are very poor.Skidelsky also appears to have been misled by Richard Kahn and Joan Robinson into believing that Keynes was a strictly literary economist, who was a poor mathematician by 1927. Supposedly,Keynes had never taken the twenty minutes that was necessary to understand the theory of value(microeconomics).Based on these bizarre beliefs,Skidelsky comes to the queer conclusion that Keynes deliberately refused to present any formal mathematical model of his general theory in the General Theory(1936;GT).Any mathematically trained reader can find Keynes's completely worked out model,with the results presented in the form of elasticities so that a reader of the GT can compare Keynes's results with those of A C Pigou,in chapters 19,20,and 21 of the GT.Keynes then compares and contrasts his model with Pigou's model,who had also presented his results in the form of elasticities, in the appendix to chapter 19 of the GT.A technically trained economist should purchase a copy of the GT instead of this book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Oustanding!
This is an outstanding book from an outstanding mind better known from his revolutionary economic ideas.

Contains the first mathematically designed interval estimate approach to probability in history


In this path breaking contribution to the logic of probability,Keynes showed how to adapt the work of George Boole for the purpose of estimating probabilities.Keynes is the first scholar in history to explicitly emphasize the importance of interval estimates in decision making.For Keynes there are only two types of probability estimates,point estimates and interval estimates;ordinal ranking can be incorporated into the interval estimate classification.Unfortunately,Keynes decided to call interval estimates " non-numerical " probabilities.His reasoning is really quite obvious.A precise estimate of probability used a single numeral for the point estimate.Therefore,an imprecise,indeterminate estimate of probability used two numerals to denote an interval(set).Thus, an interval estimate is not based on the use of a single number or numeral but two numbers or numerals.This is what Ramsey fundamentally objected to. These types of probabilities are ,thus ," non-numerical " because you are not using a single numeral.In 1922 and 1926,Frank Ramsey reviewed Keynes's book based on his very brief,partial, and haphazard reading of parts of chapters 1-4 plus 3 pages from Part II and 4 pages from Part V.Keynes's discussion of non-numerical probabilities takes place in detail in chapters 5,10,15 and 17,although there is a clear discussion of intervals for the careful readercontained in chapter 3.Keynes then applies his new approach to induction and analogy in chapters 20 and 22,using his concept of " finite probability " ,which applies to both precise ,numerical probabilities and imprecise, non-numerical probabilities.All of Keynes's discoveries ,however,were ignored by the ignorant Ramsey.It is unfortunate that the editorial foreword to the 1973 Collected Writings of JMK edition of the TP, written by Richard Braithwaite ,simply repeats all of the errors made by Ramsey in his reviews.Consider Braithwaite's paraphrase of Ramsey's argument that " On Keynes's theory it is something of a mystery why the probability relations should be governed by the probability calculus."(p.xx,1973).The answer is reallyquite simple. First,the " non numerical " interval estimates will not be governed by the probability calculus rules of conjunction and disjunction.Second,numerical probability calculations,such as the blue-green taxi cab problem of Tversky and Kahneman,will only satisfy the probability calculus if the weight of the evidence,w,is equal to 1,where w is defined as an element on the unit interval between 0 and 1 and measures the relative completeness of the available evidence upon which the probability estimates are to be calculatedKeynes was the first scholar in history to define and create an index to measure the weight of the evidence .[To this day(2007)one can regularly read about Keynes's " strange,mysterious,unfathomable,undefined " non-numerical probabilities in literally hundreds of economics and philosophy journal articles and books that have been written about Keynes's approach to probability since the Ramsey reviews were first published 80 years ago.Ramsey's reviews are still cited as " overwhelming " evidence that Keynes agreed that Ramsey's critique had completely demolished the entire structure of his logical approach to probability.Nothing could be further from the truth.Ramsey's theory is a special case that holds only when allthe probabilities are numerical,additive,precise, and unique.This requires that the weight of the evidence ,w, be equal to 1 so that the probability calculus(addition and multiplication rules) of mathematical probability can be applied.Ramsey's reviews were so poor that Keynes and Bertrand Russell attempted to downplay their relevance so as to save Ramsey from being embarrassed in the academic community.]Keynes then showed that interval estimates,because they frequently overlap and/or will be contained inside another interval,would very likely also,in many cases,be nonmeasurable,noncomparable and/or nonrankable if a decision maker used such order preserving operators like " greater than or equal to " or "less than or equal to " or "equal to".While this is quite obvious to any reader of Part II of the TP who has covered pp.160-163 and pp.186-194 of the TP or the comparable pages from Booles 1854 classic,p.268,pp.276-278,pp.281-283,etc.,it went completely over Ramsey's head.Ramsey had never comprehended what it was that Booole was doing in Part V of the Laws of Thought. Keynes's second major advance was to create his "conventional coefficient of weight and risk ", c=p/(1+q)[2w/(1+w)] in sections 7 and 8 of chapter 26 . The goal of the decision maker is to Maximize cA,where A is some outcome.This decision rule solves most of the paradoxes and anomalies that plague subjective expected utility theory.A major accomplishment made by Keynes in chapter 26 of the TP was to specify that the weight of the evidence variable,w,was defined on the unit interval [0,1].It would be forty years before Daniel Ellsberg would define his practically identical variable,rho,on the unit interval between 0 and 1 also,where rho measured the degree of confidence in the decision maker's information base.Since these two measures are one to one onto and isomorphic,Keynesian weight(uncertainty in the General Theory) and Ellsbergian ambiguity measure the same thing and are interchangeable.This means that Ellsberg's analysis can be applied when studying the GT and used to buttress Keynes's theory of liquidity preference in the GT.You simply substitute rho for w in the c formula above or substitute w for rho in Ellsberg's decision rules.In Part 5 of this book ,Keynes showed how one could use Chebyshev's Inequality as a lower bound to the normal probability distributions overly precise and inaccurate point estimate . Part 5 of the Treatise,which is based on Part III's analysis of induction and analogy, also includes Keynes's advocacy of the Lexis Q test for the dynamic stability of a statistical frequency[law of large numbers]over time.It is this part of the TP that forms the basis,along with chapter 17's analysis of the misuse of the Normal distribution in science and social science,of Keynes's exchange with Tinbergen over the logical foundations of econometrics(the use of multiple regression and correlation analysis in the study of time series data) in the Economic Journal in 1939-1940.Keynes pointed out that ,in order to justify his assumption of normality,Tinbergen needed to apply the Lexis Q test to his time series data.Tinbergen never applied either that test or the Chi- Square test for goodness of fit.TINBERGEN NEVER APPLIED ANY GOODNESS OF FIT TEST TO HIS TIME SERIES DATA IN HIS LIFETIME.This will then bring the reader back to Keynes's chapter 8 of the Treatise ,where he presents his own logical frequency interpretation of probability as a special case of his general logical approach to probability.This chapter includes his criticism of Venn's particular version of a frequency approach.

Treats mathematical probability as a limiting case of logical probability


In this path breaking contribution to the logic of probability,Keynes showed how to adapt the work of George Boole for the purpose of estimating probabilities.Keynes is the first scholar in history to explicitly emphasize the importance of interval estimates in decision making.For Keynes there are only two types of probability estimates,point estimates and interval estimates.Unfortunately,Keynes decided to call interval estimates " non-numerical "probabilities.His reasoning is really quite obvious.A precise estimate of probability used a single numeral for the point estimate.Therefore,an imprecise estimate of probability used two numerals to denote an interval(set).Thus, an interval estimate is not based on a single numeral but two. These types of probabilities are thus " non-numerical "because you are not using a single numeral.In 1922 and 1926,Frank Ramsey reviewed Keynes's book based on his reading of chapters 1-4 plus 3 pages from Part II and 4 pages from Part V.Keynes's discussion of non-numerical probabilities takes place in chapters 5,10,15 and 17.Keynes then applies his new approach to induction and analogy in chapters 20 and 22,using his concept of " finite probability " ,which applies to both precise ,numerical probabilities and imprecise, non-numerical probabilities.All of Keynes's discoveries ,however,were ignored by the ignorant Ramsey.It is unfortunate that the editorial foreword to the 1973 Collected Writings of JMK edition of the TP, written by Richard Braithwaite ,simply repeats all of the errors made by Ramsey in his reviews.Consider Braithwaite's paraphrase of Ramsey's argument that " On Keynes's theory it is something of a mystery why the probability relations should be governed by the probability calculus."(p.xx,1973).The answer is quite simple. First,the " non numerical " interval estimates will not be governed by the probability calculus.Second,numerical probability calculations,such as the blue-green taxi cab problem of Tversky and Kahneman,will only satisfy the probability calculus if the weight of the evidence,w,is equal to 1,where w is defined as an element on the unit interval between 0 and 1 and measures the relative completeness of the available evidence upon which the probability estimates are to be calculated.(To this day(2006)one can regularly read about Keynes's " strange,mysterious,unfathomable,undefined " non-numerical probabilities in literally hundreds of economics and philosophy journal articlesand books that have been written about Keynes's approach to probability since the Ramsey reviews were first published 80 years ago.These reviews are still cited as " overwhelming " evidence that Keynes agreed that Ramsey's critique hadcompletely demolished the entire structure of his logical approach to probability.Nothing could be further from the truth.Ramsey's reviews were so poor that Keynes and Bertrand Russell attempted to downplay their relevance so as to save Ramsey from being embarrassed in the academic community.)Keynes then showed that interval estimates,because they frequently overlap,would very likely also,in many cases,be nonmeasurable,noncomparable and/or nonrankable if a decision maker used such order preserving operators like " greater than or equal to " or "less than or equal to ".While this is quite obvious to any reader of Part II of the TP,it went completely over Ramsey's head. Keynes's second major advance was to create his "conventional coefficient of weight and risk", c=p/(1+q)[2w/(1+w)] in sections 7 and 8 of chapter 26 . The goal of the decision maker is to Maximize cA,where A is some outcome.This decision rule solves most of the paradoxes and anomalies that plague subjective expected utility theory.A major accomplishment made by Keynes in chapter 26 of the TP was to specify that the weight of the evidence variable,w,was defined on the unit interval [0,1].It would be forty years before Daniel Ellsberg would define his practically identical variable,rho,on the unit interval between 0 and 1 also,where rho measured the degree of confidence in the decision maker's information base.Since these two measures are one to one onto and isomorphic,Keynesian weight(uncertainty in the General Theory) and Ellsbergian ambiguity measure the same thing and are interchangeable.This means that Ellsberg's analysis can be applied when studying the GT and used to buttress Keynes's theory of liquidity preference in the GT.In Part 5 of this book ,Keynes showed how one could use Chebyshev's Inequality as a lower bound to the normal probability distributions overly preciseand inaccurate point estimate . Part 5 of the Treatise also includes Keynes's advocacy of the Lexis Q test for stability of a statistical frequency[law of large numbers].It is this part of the TP that forms the basis,along with chapter 17,of Keynes's exchange with Tinbergen over the logical foundations of econometrics in the Economic Journal in 1939-1940.Keynes pointed out that ,in order to justify his assumption of normality,Tinbergen needed to apply the Lexis Q test.Tinbergen never applied either that test or the Chi- Square test for goodness of fit.This will then bring the reader back to Keynes's chapter 8 of the Treatise ,where he presents his own logical frequency interpretation of probability as a special case of his general logical approach to probability after criticizing Venn's particular version of a frequency approach.

The best bookpublished on the foundations of probability
In this path breaking contribution to the logic of probability,Keynes showed how to adapt the work of George Boole for the purpose of estimating probabilities.Keynes is the first scholar in history to explicitly emphasize the importance of interval estimates in decision making.For Keynes there are only two types of probability estimates,point estimates and interval estimates.Unfortunately,Keynes decided to call interval estimates "non-numerical"probabilities.His reasoning is really quite obvious.A precise estimate of probability used a single numeral for the point estimate.Therefore,an imprecise estimate of probability used two numerals to denote an interval(set).Thus, an interval estimate is not based on a single numeral but two. These types of probabilities are thus "non-numerical"because you are not using a single numeral.In 1922 and 1926,Frank Ramsey reviewed Keynes's book based on his reading of chapters 1-4 plus 3 pages from Part two and 4 pages from Part five.Keynes's discussion of non-numerical probabilities takes place in chapters 5,10,15 and 17.Keynes then applies his new approach to induction and analogy in chapters 20 and 22,using his concept of "finite probability"which applies to both precise numerical probabilities and imprecise non-numerical probabilities.All of Keynes's discoveries ,however,were ignored by the ignorant Ramsey.(To this day(2005)one can regularly read about Keynes's "strange,mysterious,unfathomable,undefined"non-numerical probabilities in literally hundreds of economics and philosophy journal articlesthat are based primarilyon Ramsey's reviews.These reviews are still cited as "overwhelming" evidence that Keynes agreed that Ramsey's critique had demolished the entire structure of his logical approach to probability.Nothing could be further from the truth.Ramsey's reviews were so poor that Keynes and Bertrand Russell attempted to downplay their relevance so as to save Ramsey from being embarrassed in the academic community.)Keynes then showed that interval estimates,because they overlap,would very likely also,in many cases,be noncomparable and/or nonrankable if a decision maker used such order preserving operators like"greater than or equal to"or "less than or equal to".While this is quite obvious,it went completely over Ramsey's head. Keynes's second major advance was to create his "conventional coefficient of weight and risk", c=p/(1+q)[2w/(1+w)]. The goal of the decision maker is to Maximize cA,where A is some outcome.This decision rule solves all of the paradoxes and anomalies that plague subjective expected utility theory.A major accomplishment made by Keynes in chapter 26 of the TP was to specify that the weight of the evidence variable,w,was defined on the unit interval [0,1].It would be forty years before Daniel Ellsberg would define his practically identical variable,rho,on the unit interval between 0 and 1 also,where rho measured the degree of confidence in the decision maker's information base.Since these two measures are one to one onto and isomorphic,Keynesian weight(uncertainty in the General Theory) and Ellsbergian ambiguity measure the same thing and are interchangeable.This means that Ellsberg's analysis can be applied when studying the GT and used to buttress Keynes's theory of liquidity preference in the GT.In Part 5 of this book ,Keynes showed how one could use Chebyshev's Inequality as a lower bound to the normal probability distributions overly precise point estimate . Part 5 of the Treatise also includes Keynes's advocacy of the Lexis Q test for stability of a statistical frequency[law of large numbers].It is this part of the TP that forms the basis,along with chapter 17,of Keynes's exchange with Tinbergen over the logical foundations of econometrics in the Economic Journal in 1939-1940.Keynes pointed out that ,in order to justify his assumption of normality,Tinbergen needed to apply the Lexis Q test.Tinbergen never applied either that test or the Chi- Square test for goodness of fit.This will then bring the reader back to Keynes's chapter 8 of the Treatise ,where he presents his own logical frequency interpretation of probability as a special case of his general logical approach to probability.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

I've rarely seen something this complex made this clear.
Skousen has really accomplished something with this book.If the average college professor could convey the information in their field of study with this kind of penetrating clarity, a lot more people would really understand what they learn, rather than just preparing to parrot it back for a test.

This book captures a broad cross-section of the ideas and history behind modern economic thought and ties it all neatly together by linking everything with the simple idea of relating it to Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes.It's brilliant in its simplicity.Skousen starts by saying these are the three you really need to know.Then he says they aren't created equal and ranks them out: #1 Smith, #2 Keynes, #3 Marx.Seems like nothing, but all of a sudden you have a simple and solid mental framework from which to hang the rest of what Skousen tells you.

For each of Skousen's three main characters, you learn about the thinkersthat laid the foundation for each of them (or in Smith's case, the lack thereof).You also learn about the historic events that spurred each of them to come up with their theories.You learn each of their theories, then finally - and so critically - you learn in plain English the shortcomings of each of the theories (fatal in two cases).

All of a sudden, you have a deeper understanding of the history and ideas of economics than a lot people who majored in the subject.And because of Skousen's entertaining writing style, you never really noticed how much you were learning.

Kudos to Mark Skousen.I wish more people (myself included) could write like this.

If you've ever had even the slightest interest in economics, do yourself a favor and read this book.You'll be glad you did.

A work of impeccable scholarship
Enhanced throughout with charts and photos, "The Big Three In Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, And John Maynard Keynes" by academician and economist Mark Skousen is a history of modern economics as represented by the contributions of the three most influential economists in world history. Adam Smith expounded a revolutionary new doctrine in the 18th century that a nation of rich and poor could flourish under laissez faire and an unfettered market; Karl Marx inspired disenfranchised workers and intellectuals in the 19th century to end the exploitation of the underprivileged by the powerful; and in the 20th century, British economist John Maynard Keynes sought to stabilize a crisis prone market system through activist fiscal and monetary government policies. A work of impeccable scholarship that draws from both biographical and historical data to showcase the lives and ideas of three men who shaped economic theory and practice form three centuries, and whose contributions continue to influence economists in the 21st century, "The Big Three In Economics" is very strongly recommended reading for both students of Economics and non-specialist general readers with an interest in economic history and theory.

The Big Three in Economics
The author Mark Skousen explains the differences of three schools of
economics real well plus its an easy read.
Bob Rivera

The March to Today's Thinking
This is an excellent book that shows the development of mainstream economic thinking in terms of the theories of the three giants in economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes.

Adam Smith (1723-90) was the first. He basically provided the first foundation of what is now called economics. Today he is considered to the right wing of the economic scale. Interestingly enough, his views have prevailed.

Karl Marx (1818-83) reacted against the Adam Smith theory with the belief that the 'invisible hand' of the marketplace has no compassion for the workers and that this could be better administered by a compassionate government. Generally discredited today, his theories seems to live mostly in the halls of the universities.

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) followed with an analysis of a way to stop recession/depression cycles that combined the Smith/Marx theories.

The author does an excellent job in tracing the impact of these three as it reaches today's world. At this time Smith is on top again, as modified by later thinkers, but as the author concludes in his last chapter,

'There is no telling how high the world's standard of living can reach through expanded trade, lower tariffs, a simplified tax system, school choice, Social Security privatization, a fair system of justice, and a stable monetary system. Yet bad policies, wasted resources, and class hatred die slowly.'

Economic theories made enjoyable
The three colorful and informative biographies which form the core of this book are followed by vignettes of the economic thinkers who came after them, and trace the development of economic theory.The book is thus an easily used guide to the history of economic thought.Graphs and technical material are held to a necessary and elucidating minimum.


On March 6, Mark Skousen had a commentary in The Christian Science Monitor on "Atlas Shrugged" after 50 years.I had never wanted to read the book--and still don't--but I was impressed by Skousen's logical thinking and clear writing.So, when I saw the reference to his newly published "Big Three" I ordered the book, pretty much convinced I would learn something painlessly.And I did.

Just for starters: Did you know that Marx died a wealthy man--with an income in the top 2% of the English populace?Did you know that Adam Smith's theory of free markets was an opposition to the European mercantile system of government-sanctioned cartels?Did you know that he regarded the right to sell one's labor and products as a function of human liberty? Did you know that he posited an "invisible hand" that guided economics where there was human liberty? Did you know that Thomas Carlyle dubbed economics the "dismal science?"

Did you know that the historical way of increasing the labor supply and expanding assets was to go to war and take slaves and steal another nation's gold? Did you know that it was not generic "capitalism" but the failure of the Federal Reserve Bank to act that caused the Great Depression?

These are a few of the gems of wisdom garnered from just a quick reading of this book.

Mark Skousen is an unabashed believer in the free-market system. Here he clearly presents its problems and practical limitations, as well as the criticisms levelled against it, He also points out the deficiencies in logic in Marx and Keynes's theories.

I had taken a year of Econ in college and enjoyed it, and then I worked as a translator from a Norwegian trade journal for several years, translating articles by members of the Austrian school of economics (Mises, Hayek, etc).A lot of it had to do with keeping a destroyed Europe from going economically socialist and politically bolshevist in the aftermath of WWII and the occupation of the East by Russia. BUT - I had no idea who Adam Smith was until I read this book, nor did I understand how the various theories hung together.

So, whether you're a beginner or just have gaps in your knowledge, this
small, inexpensive, and thoroughly enjoyable book should prove immediately and permanently valuable. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Read Keynes himself; don't read this boring mess
John Maynard Keynes apparently had a life full of brilliant ideas, and the evolution from one idea to another is a brilliant story. I'm not quite sure how I know this, because the second volume of Robert Skidelsky's Keynes biography doesn't really convey it. But I do know it, somehow.

The main thing I've learned from this book is that I should go and read Keynes himself. Whenever Skidelsky quotes Keynes at any length, I breathe fresh air and I'm reminded that life can, indeed, be a wonderful place. For the remaining 95% of the book, I'm plodding through perfectly serviceable but unengaging prose. Skidelsky doesn't explain Keynes's economics well enough for intelligent non-specialists to really get the point. He explains Keynes's social life decently well, but one can consume only so much about country vacations and "Bloomsberries" before mentally consigning the lot of them to an eternity of bad food and cattiness.

The jacket insists that Skidelsky has told an amazing love story, presumably the one between Keynes and Lydia Lopokova. I don't know quite which biography that reviewer was reading. Certainly not this one.

I'm told there's a condensed version of the Keynes bio: one volume instead of three. That may be worth your time. It depends on what you want. The life of Keynes doesn't actually seem all that interesting on its own -- no more interesting than any other smart person's life, and substantially less interesting than Bertrand Russell's (with whose life Keynes's overlaps). As for the content of Keynes's ideas, those certainly are worth the time, but I just can't see that Skidelsky -- condensed or otherwise -- is the man to teach these to us.

Probably the best route is to read Keynes's own Economic Consequences of the Peace, Tract on Monetary Reform, Essays in Persuasion, and General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. I'm told that Alvin Hansen's Guide To Keynes is how economists normally approach the General Theory, and my initial glance at Hansen's book suggests that it's a good start.

If we believe Skidelsky, Keynes's Treatise on Money is overlong, impenetrable, and notationally confused. I trust bad writers to spot their kin, so I believe him on this score.

Skidelsky overlooks Keynes's mathematical contributions
I highly recommend the second volume of Skidelsky's three volume study of the life of John Maynard Keynes for the general reader.The general reader will be rewarded with a 5 star performance.Skidelsky masterfully weaves an incredible amount of material about the private and public life of Keynes in a manner that will provide thenonspecialist,general reader with many hours of reading pleasure.Unfortunately,the same cannot be said for the specialist seeking a technical analysis and evaluation of Keynes's scientific contributions to philosophy,applied probability,applied statistics,decision science and economics.It is in this area that Skidelsky fumbles the ball just as it appeared that he was going to go all the way and score a touchdown.This is most likely due to the fact that he is a historian with little or no training in philosophy,mathematics,statistics,probability and economics.Let me catalog the technical problems .First,Skidelsky confuses the 12th-13th century debate between the nominalists and the realists(Platonists) with the realist versus idealist debate of the 19th-20th centurybetween,among others,G.E.Mooreand Bertrand Russell(the realists of the 20th century who would be supporting the nominalists in the 12th century),on the one hand and J.M.E.McTaggart and F.H.Bradley,on the other hand,who would be supporting,in general,the realists of the 12th century.(See Skidelsky's extremely confusing discussion on pp.74-77).Second,Skidelsky is completely confused about the nature and construction of Keynesian probabilities.Keynesian probabilities,in general,are intervals.They require the use of two numbers ,not one.The first number is called a lower bound.The second number is called an upper bound.Keynes's approximation method has absolutely nothing to do with ordinal rankings. In fact,the general case occurring among decision makers in the real world would be of overlapping intervals.Consider the following simple example.Let probability one be estimated by the interval[.4,.6].Let probability two be estimated by the interval[.5,.7].The probabilities have very specific numeric bounds,but they are ,in fact,nonrankable,noncomparable and nonadditive.It is not possible to say that one of the two probabilities is greater than,less than or equal to the other probability.Skidelsky has accepted at face value the extremely poor analysis of Keynes's TP done by F.Ramsey in two book reviews published in 1922 and 1926.Ramsey committed the fatal error of misinterpreting Keynes's chapter 3 terms in the TP,nonnumerical and nonmeasurable,as meaning that no numbers could in general be used to estimate the probability relation.Ramsey never read chapters 15 and 17 of the TP where Keynes made it clear that most probabilities could be represented as intervals.(The reader will find literally one dozen errorsof omission or commission committed on pp.58-61 and 67-73 of Skidelsky with regard to the issue of the use of numbers in Keynes's logical theory of probability).Skidelsky ignores Keynes's creation of an index to measure the weight of the evidence,w,where w is defined on the unit interval[0,1]and measures the completeness of the relevant potential evidence available upon which to make an estimate of a probability.Skidelsky overlooks Keynes's conventional coefficient of risk and weight,c,that solves all of the paradoxes of subjective expected utility theory.Keynes was the first scholar in history to devise a decision rule incorporating nonlinear probabilities and weight of the evidence(later called ambiguity of the evidence by D.Ellsberg in 1961).Lastly,Skidelsky has overlooked the mathematical specification of Keynes's theory of effective demand that Keynes derived from his Y model of chapter 10and from his D-Z model of chapters 3,20-21 of the General Theory in 1936.Let us define w to equal a constant money wage,p to equal the price level,w/p to equal the real wage,MPL to equal the marginal product of labor in the aggregate,MPC to equal the marginal propensity to spend on consumption goods, and MPI to equal the marginal propensity to spend on copital goods.Keynes then arrives at the following general result:w/p=MPL/(MPC+MPI).The classical and neoclassical(monetarism,rational expectations,real business cycle theory,etc.)theories are all special cases which require that MPC+MPI=1.Skidelsky's claim that Keynes did not provide a mathematical model of his theory of effective demand in the GT (see pp.537-542,especially p.540)is an error in magnitude equal to the errors made by Frank Ramsey about the meaning of the terms "nonnumerical" and"non measurable".The specialist will be disappointed with this volume of Skidelsky's biography of J.M.Keynes.

Economics is a moral science
The second part of Prof. Skidelsky's magnificent biography of J.M. Keynes is nearly totally concentrated on economic issues. Keynes' personal life was perfectly settled after his marriage with a Russian ballerina. He continued to be in contact with the Bloomsbury group, which 'remained subversive by habit, but was anxious to retain their dividends and beauftiful houses'.
In fact, this book centres on the question how Keynes came to write the 'General Theory' and its defense of governmental intervention (public investments) in the economic cycle in order to break the capitalistic slump. He proved that in a laisser-faire system an equilibrium could be formed at a far lesser level than 'natural' unemployment: 'There is work to do, there are men to do it. Why not bring them together!'
We discover that Malthus was a real influential precursor with his proposition to prop up insufficient demand by public works and that Richard Kahn made a decisive contribution with his multiplyer effect.
Prof. Skidelsky characterizes perfectly the 'General Theory' as a complex psychological drama with as main characters the life-denying rentier, the businessman and his fantasies and the victimized working class.
Keynes' ultimate nightmare was a world were making money triumphed over making things, which is actually happening. Financial transactions are dwarfing the industrial ones and there are many more investment trusts than industrial companies in the US.
The discussions after the publication of the 'General Theory' are fascinating. In fact, the debate is still red hot: inflation/deflation, the influence of the (inter)national banks, savings and (un)employment.
This book is not an easy read. I recommend readers to (re)read some parts of the 'General Theory'. But this work is a fascinating tale about the (r)evolution of the ideas of the greatest economist of all times.
I have only one minor remark: Ibsen is a Norwegian, not a Swede.

Who was more keynesian them Keynes himself?
Keynes activities, both as an active participant of the economic life of his country andcontinent, and as an icon to the cultural life of his epoch and to his many friends and groups of interest, is impressive. To define him is an elusive task: philosopher?, economist?, historian?, linguist?. He was all this and much more, but he was above all a man of a very practical mind and, notwhidstanding his immense philosophical background, deeply attached to thetheories of his contemporary G.E.Moore and others, he had the feeling of having a mission to accomplish, given the immense superiority his intellect had over the rest of the mortals.

What was to become of Europe after the end of the First World War was foreseen by him in many essays and primarily in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The task which lays ahead for him, and only him, was to warn politicians and thinkers of the impending dangers of the years to come, specially in regard to a lack of theoretical analisys to support the transition from the old economy (classicist in his jargon), which ended with the death of the great Alfred Marshall, and a new one, which he purpoted himself to establish and then save the world. And save the world he did!!! Keynes is one of this towering figures who had the opportunity to mingle himself with daily facts and change them for the better. Amid a lot of controversy and polemic regarding the originality of his ideas, he published his major opus in 1937, which was to be used against the vagaries of rampant unemployment and inflation. His General Theory of Interest , Employment and Money is a sort of tribute he pays to his father , Malthus and G.E.Moore.
In the personnal side of his life, if this can be said of Keynes for his personal life was eminently devoted to cultural interests i many areas, the book portrays some important changes in his personal atitudes towards homosexuality (he abandoned) and his new life marrying the russian ballerina Ludmila.

When you we get volume 3?
A great book about a great man. The development of Keynes' thought is handled well, although some more discussion around possible sources of some of his ideas would have been welcome. Several books about his Bloomsburyfreinds have emerged recently, and it is interesting to compareperceptions. I'm uncomfortable with Skidelsky's analysis of Keynesiantheory which strikes me as too much of a shoe-horning of Keynes into aclassical framework, but I'm hardly an expert. All in all a book to besavoured, and an essential item in one's library. ... Read more

Book Description
An Unabridged Printing, With Bibliography And A Comprehensive Index. Chapters Include: The Meaning Of Probability - Probability In Relation To The Theory Of Knowledge - The Measurement Of Probabilities - The Principle Of Indifference - Other Methods Of Determining Probabilities - The Weight Of Arguments - Historical Retrospect - The Frequency Theory Of Probability - The Theory Of Groups, With Special Reference To Logical Consistence, Inference, And Logical Priority - The Definitions And Axioms Of Inference And Probability - The Fundamental Theorems Of Necessary Inference - The Fundamental Theorems Of Probable Inference - Numerical Measurement And Approximation Of Probabilities - Some Problems In Inverse Probability, Including Averages - The Nature Of Argument By Analogy - The Value Of Multiplication Of Instances, Or Pure Induction - Some Historical Notes On Induction - The Meanings Of Objective Chance, And Of Randomness - Some Problems Arising Out Of The Discussion Of Chance - The Application Of Probability To Conduct - The Nature Of Statistical Inference - The Law Of Great Numbers - The Theorems Of Bernoulli, Poisson, And Tchebycheff - Etc., Etc. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The best book ever written on probability,induction and analogy
In this path breaking contribution to the logic of probability,Keynes showed how to adapt the work of George Boole for the purpose of estimating probabilities.Keynes is the first scholar in history to explicitly emphasize the importance of interval estimates in decision making.For Keynes there are only two types of probability estimates,point estimates and interval estimates;ordinal ranking can be incorporated in the interval classification.Unfortunately,Keynes decided to call interval estimates " non-numerical " probabilities.His reasoning is really quite obvious.A precise estimate of probability used a single numeral for the point estimate.Therefore,an imprecise estimate of probability used two numerals to denote an interval(set).Thus, an interval estimate is not based on the use of a single number ornumeral but two numbers or numerals. These types of probabilities are thus " non-numerical " because you are not using a single numeral.In 1922 and 1926,Frank Ramsey reviewed Keynes's book based on his very brief and haphazard reading of parts of chapters 1-4 plus 3 pages from Part II and 4 pages from Part V.Keynes's discussion of non-numerical probabilities takes place in detailin chapters 5,10,15 and 17,although there is a clear discussion of intervals for the careful reader in chapter 3.Keynes then applies his new approach to induction and analogy in chapters 20 and 22,using his concept of " finite probability " ,which applies to both precise ,numerical probabilities and imprecise, non-numerical probabilities.All of Keynes's discoveries ,however,were ignored by the ignorant Ramsey.It is unfortunate that the editorial foreword to the 1973 Collected Writings of JMK edition of the TP, written by Richard Braithwaite ,simply repeats all of the errors made by Ramsey in his reviews.Consider Braithwaite's paraphrase of Ramsey's argument that " On Keynes's theory it is something of a mystery why the probability relations should be governed by the probability calculus."(p.xx,1973).The answer is quite simple. First,the " non numerical " interval estimates will not be governed by the probability calculus.Second,numerical probability calculations,such as the blue-green taxi cab problem of Tversky and Kahneman,will only satisfy the probability calculus if the weight of the evidence,w,is equal to 1,where w is defined as an element on the unit interval between 0 and 1 and measures the relative completeness of the available evidence upon which the probability estimates are to be calculated.[To this day(2007)one can regularly read about Keynes's " strange,mysterious,unfathomable,undefined " non-numerical probabilities in literally hundreds of economics and philosophy journal articles and books that have been written about Keynes's approach to probability since the Ramsey reviews were first published 80 years ago.These reviews are still cited as " overwhelming " evidence that Keynes agreed that Ramsey's critique had completely demolished the entire structure of his logical approach to probability.Nothing could be further from the truth.Ramsey's theory is a special case that holds when all probabilities are numerical.This requires that the weight of the evidence ,w, be equal to 1 so that the probability calculus(addition and multiplication rules) of mathematical probability can be applied.Ramsey's reviews were so poor that Keynes and Bertrand Russell attempted to downplay their relevance so as to save Ramsey from being embarrassed in the academic community.]Keynes then showed that interval estimates,because they frequently overlap and/or will be contained inside another interval,would very likely also,in many cases,be nonmeasurable,noncomparable and/or nonrankable if a decision maker used such order preserving operators like " greater than or equal to " or "less than or equal to " or "equal to".While this is quite obvious to any reader of Part II of the TP,it went completely over Ramsey's head. Keynes's second major advance was to create his "conventional coefficient of weight and risk ", c=p/(1+q)[2w/(1+w)] in sections 7 and 8 of chapter 26 . The goal of the decision maker is to Maximize cA,where A is some outcome.This decision rule solves most of the paradoxes and anomalies that plague subjective expected utility theory.A major accomplishment made by Keynes in chapter 26 of the TP was to specify that the weight of the evidence variable,w,was defined on the unit interval [0,1].It would be forty years before Daniel Ellsberg would define his practically identical variable,rho,on the unit interval between 0 and 1 also,where rho measured the degree of confidence in the decision maker's information base.Since these two measures are one to one onto and isomorphic,Keynesian weight(uncertainty in the General Theory) and Ellsbergian ambiguity measure the same thing and are interchangeable.This means that Ellsberg's analysis can be applied when studying the GT and used to buttress Keynes's theory of liquidity preference in the GT.In Part 5 of this book ,Keynes showed how one could use Chebyshev's Inequality as a lower bound to the normal probability distributions overly precise and inaccurate point estimate . Part 5 of the Treatise,which is based on Part III's analysis of induction and analogy, also includes Keynes's advocacy of the Lexis Q test for the stability of a statistical frequency[law of large numbers].It is this part of the TP that forms the basis,along with chapter 17,of Keynes's exchange with Tinbergen over the logical foundations of econometrics in the Economic Journal in 1939-1940.Keynes pointed out that ,in order to justify his assumption of normality,Tinbergen needed to apply the Lexis Q test to his time series data.Tinbergen never applied either that test or the Chi- Square test for goodness of fit.TINBERGEN NEVER APPLIED ANY GOODNESS OF FIT TEST TO HIS TIME SERIES DATA IN HIS LIFETIME.This will then bring the reader back to Keynes's chapter 8 of the Treatise ,where he presents his own logical frequency interpretation of probability as a special case of his general logical approach to probability.This chapter includes his criticism of Venn's particular version of a frequency approach.


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Customer Reviews (1)

Minsky understood the importance that uncertainty played in the GT but never grasped the technical details in chapters 20and 21
This book containsan excellent summary of what Keynes emphasized in the GT -the impact of uncertainty on long run investment spending,on the rate of interest(liquidity preference and the speculative demand for money),and the subsequent dominating role that various forms of speculation,based on margin account financing and leveraging,would obtain periodically in financial markets both in the USA and the world.
The main criticism of the book is that Minsky had absolutely no idea about the technical analysis that Keynes presented in the GT in chapters 19(appendix to chapter 19)20,and 21 in the form of elacticities which demonstrated the special case nature of neoclassical economics.However,this criticism applies to practically all economists,historians,etc.Nonecan follow Keynes's mathematical analysis,although Meade came very close to duplicating Keynes's results in 1937. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (15)

Historical Read and Timeless Classic
This is the first book by economist John Maynard Keynes, and one of his most important. Controversial when it was released, and probably still a little controversial today, this book is an interesting view into the mind of one of the most influential economical minds.

Brisk, passionate, utterly convincing
The Economic Consequences of the Peace always feels like it's going to get dragged down by statistics, but it rarely does. Indeed it's one of the best presentations of a heavily numerical argument in plain English that I've seen.

Keynes wants to convince us, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Germany will never be able to pay the reparations demanded of it. Accordingly, the middle 70% of the book is a detailed accounting of Germany's exports, imports, and internal health. Among many other findings, Keynes shows that Germany couldn't possibly pay the reparations without giving up most every creature comfort -- down to coffee and tobacco. And as for its exports, allowing Germany to wither economically would drag down the rest of Europe with it.

Keynes dispenses with that middle 70% as clearly and briskly as he can, as support for the moral argument. In large part, Germany cannot pull itself out of the hell it's in until its people have some confidence in the future -- until, in effect, they stop hoarding their bread under the mattress and start eating it instead.

Keynes explores this from an angle I hadn't thought of before. In essence, his point is that fears about the future change the world as it is today: why would you sign a long-term contract denominated in marks if you believed the marks would be valueless in a year? Under the circumstances, the honorable thing would be to refuse to do business with anything but German businesses. Before you can conduct foreign trade, you need currency stability. And, in turn, how can you expect currency stability when reparations force Germany to hand over nearly all of its gold and silver?

This book is an excellent blend of the moral and the statistical, the practical and the hopeful. And it also happens to be a terrific ground-level view of the world immediately after 1919.

Brilliant foresight
John Maynard Keynes describes in sufficient detail, and in the flowing language of his day, the terms of the Treaty of Versailles - particularly how they laid the groundwork for future conflict in Europe. It is easy to view his ideas as commonsense in light of the benefits of hindsight, yet this book is remarkably insightful in its predictions that eventually manifested themselves during the Second World War. Above all, this work should be valued as a classic example that the Carthaginian terms of the Paris Peace Conference did not go unnoticed during their time. They were then, as now, seen as a dangerous effort in retribution that would only rub salt in the wounds of Europe.

Keynes' disorganized critique of the Versailles Treaty
This book achieved instant fame when it was published in 1919, not only for its scathing criticism of the Versailles Treaty but also for its personal attacks against leading signatories (especially Clemenceau and Wilson).For a book focused primarily on economic concerns, the text is surprisingly easy to read.However, the book's poor organization vitally detracts from its effectiveness.The principle reason the book is still famous today lies in the fact that it was written by none other than John Maynard Keynes, the founder of 20th century style, gov't & debt driven economics.

The book is organized into chapters on pre-war Europe, Allied statesmen, summary of key treaty points, reparations, post-war Europe predictions, and Keynes' suggestion of remedies to provide a practical treaty settlement.Unfortunately, within each chapter things are jumbled together without clear rhyme or reason.(Is this indicative of Keynes' own personal organization and logical thinking?)

Within the book, he makes a very practical (but politically infeasible) argument for a non-vindictive treaty.He basically suggests that the Allies should forget both about reparations and repayment of wartime debts from the other Allies, and instead they should settle (though not ideally) for frontier adjustments and confiscation of only German gov't property.(Did the German gov't sponsor Keynes' work in writing this book?)

Keynes argues that a crushing reparations burden on the German people would disincent them to produce anything beyond a mere subsistence minimum and discourage entrepreneurial enterprise.There is some logic in this point; however, later on he goes on to state that the US should forgive its $10 billion debt to its wartime allies ($5 billion of which was owed by the UK).Forgive me if I'm wrong, but doesn't such a move disincent American entreprises from entrepreneurship as well.It's extremely hypocritical that the Allied gov'ts desperately sought loans from the US during the war and then once it was over to claim that they couldn't pay them.If they didn't want to repay, then they shouldn't have borrowed the money - period.(If I borrow money to buy a home, the bank won't ever agree to forgive my debt - regardless of whether I'm out of work, injured, or the house burns down.I don't see why gov'ts should get any exceptional treatment.)

Notwithstanding his problems with disorganization and inconsistent logic, Keynes does produce a reasonable, brief list of treaty rememdies, especially in his efforts to restore economic life throughout Central and Eastern Europe.Not until the advent of the Cold War and the interests of extending American political influence would Keynes' policies largely succeed (albeit yet again to the detriment of American taxpayers).

Overall, I felt the book was ok.I would only recommend it if you have an interest in reading all of Keynes' work.Don't expect to find any theoretical economic insights in the book, though.Based on the high ratings on this page, I think the other reviewers here might have some pro-Keynesian bias.

The Relevance of a Neglected Masterpiece
This prescient book displays the keen insights of a genius observing a process and result with a devestating prediction later coming to fruition on schedule. It should serve as not only history and foresight but also as an invaluable lesson and warning for those who desire to dictate to defeated or weak nations from a position of obtained military might or success. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Confused about the aggregate supply function Z
Dillard is unable to deal with Keynes's General Theory(GT) because he writes under the misconception that Keynes's analysis of his aggregate supply function,Z,is contained in chapter 3 of the GT.Keynes made it perfectly clear that there was no analysis of any part of his theory of effective demand contained in chapter 3 of the GT.Keynes stated that there was an introductory outline in chapter 3 that might be unintelligible to the reader until it was filled in in later chapters.These later chapters are chapter 19(and its appendix),chapter 20,and chapter 21.This is obvious to anyone who is not mathematically illiterate.Keynes faced the same question from Dennis Robertson ,a self admitted mathematical illiterate ,in 1935.Keynes had sent Robertson the first 19 chapters of a draft copy of the GT.These 19 chapters are the same as the first 17 chapters of the GT.Robertson stated that he had no idea about what Keynes meant in chapter 3 of the GT about the functions D and Z and that he considered Keynes 's analysis to be hocus pocus and a lot of"...mumbo jumbo".Keynes told him that his analysis ofthe employment function, D ,and Z occurred in a later chapter that Keynes had not sent him.It is obvious from the title of chapter 20 of the GT,"The Employment Function",that it is chapter 20 and not chapter 3 that contains Keynes's worked out analysis.None of this is covered anywhere in Dillard's book or any other book written by a Post Keynesian economist(Paul Davidson,Douglas Vickers,Jan Kregel,Paul Wells,etc.) or any other kind of economist in the 20th century.

A nice book to read....
Dillard relly seems to have understood keynes.. I'd say he wrote the book with the situation that Keynes faced in kind.. The culmination of events..How must keynes have come to his conclusions in the GeneralTheory.

A Must Read!! ... Read more

Book Description
The first two volumes of Robert Skidelsky's definitive andconsummate biography of John Maynard Keynes were hailed as publishing events onboth sides of the Atlantic. Already published to acclaim in Britain, this thirdand final volume covers Keynes's later years from 1937 to his death in 1946.During this period, Keynes's outstanding contribution to the financing ofBritain's war effort, to the building of the postwar economic order, and hisrole in Britain's struggle to preserve its independence within the Atlanticalliance solidified the economist's lasting importance in twentieth-centuryhistory. Skidelsky lucidly explains Keynes's economic theories and masterfullyevokes the complexities of his personality. The book abounds in lively anecdotesand memorable portraits, notably that of his devoted wife, Lydia Lopokova, whoseeccentric but utterly logical post-Keynesian existence is charted in adelightful epilogue. Insightful and intelligent, this is a work that tells thestory of a passionate and determined visionary and provides an invaluableoverview of issues that remain at the center of international political andeconomic debate. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

In the short run we are still alive
The last part of Robert Skidelsky's magnificent biography of J.M. Keynes is a tale about the fall of the British Empire with Keynes as one of its most clairvoyant and active go-betweens trying to avoid the disaster. Great-Britain had won the war but it was bankrupt crushed by its debt contracted to buy US weapons.
This book shows clearly through its analysis of the Bretton-Woods negotiations and the discussions about the conversion of the British debt, that the ultimate goal of the US Administration was to get Britain on its knees and to take its place as world leader.
The US prefered an alliance with the Soviet Union against Britain. Their most important negotiator H.D. White was a convinced Soviet spy.
Keynes defended exhaustingly Britain's role in world matters by begging time for a reconversion of the British industry from a war to a civilian economy and for safeguarding its Commomwealth with its preferential tariff and pound sterling payment system.
The humiliating conditions for its debt conversion imposed by the US would cripple the British economy for years.
The suicidal internecine European wars created a new world hegemon: the US.

Before the war, Keynes defended his 'Treatise' policies, but saw them applied in Germany by a very clever economist, Hjalmar Schacht, who also saved the German economy internationally by creating a bilateral trade system.
Prof. Skidelsky shows us also pregnantly the deterioration of Keynes's physical condition, aggravated by his exhausting travels, difficult (empty handed) negotiations and even hard opposition at home when he was in the US.

One could perhaps slightly criticize the exhaustive excerpts of letters or the extremely detailed evolution of the negotiations in Bretton-Woods or about British debt relief. But, all in all, this is a fascinating read.

Out of your expectation
It's unexpectedly well decscibed how's Keynes in his childhood. He's in fact a well-spoken, witty gentleman with its charms inside which is mysterious. How could he become such a great economist, how he invent the theories, how he generated such a beautiful mind. It talked about Keynes' life in Eton College( a fundamental place for him to grow up and how his schoolmates affect him), and more is in King's College,Cambridge( which definitely a crucial turning point in Keynes' life) which included keynes' letter which he sent expressed his point of views, his love to Duncan. His writings were precise but in-depth. Moreover, it also includes a lot of cultural background informations which is like Cambridge traditions.It's a must-read book if you like Keynes.

A Major Force with Enduring Influence
In this, the third and concluding volume of his biography of Keynes, Skidelsky offers a brilliant analysis of one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. Skidelsky offers a remarkable discussion of the man (as opposed to the icon) whose influence seems to have fluctuated according to conventional (received?) wisdom with regard to fundamental economic principles. Economists have either agreed or disagreed about the value of Keynes's ideas (often with more heat than light) since the publication of his major work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). As a non-economist, I have only casually observed how his principles have gone in and out of favor as the national economy itselfimproves, flattens out, weakens, improves, etc. I enjoyed this book because it connected a human being with the principles to which so many others have referred in books and articles. Also because, as international trade accelerates in terms of both scope and depth (largely because of the Internet and the WWW), the role of government in each country will inevitably change...especially governments in those countries which were formerly members of the U.S.S.R. as well as in other countries in Asia, notably China. Thanks to Skidelsky's book, I am now much better prepared to recognize and understand such changes. I wish I had read the second volume in the trilogy (subtitled "The Economist as Savior") before reading this one. Those who read this review are urged to do so. However, judged wholly on its own merits, this final volume (subtitled "Fighting for Freedom") is a first-rate achievement. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Skidelsky fails to discuss Keynes's scientific contributions
This book is an excellent choice for a potential reader who is searching for a general overview of Keynes's early life.Like Moggridge's one volume study,Skidelsky's first volume(of three)has many interesting anecdotes and discussions of Keynes's interactions and involvement with a wide range of people.Unfortunately,Skidelsky drops the ball when he tries to evaluate the technical and intellectual contributions that Keynes made to applied probability,statistics and decision science in the period from 1904 to 1920.Keynesfinally published his pathbreaking work in 1921 in his A Treatise on Probability(TP).A specialistcan only come to the conclusion that Keynes made no breakthroughs in his TP after reading Skidelsky's bare bones treatment.This is most likely due to the fact that Skidelsky is a historian who has no training in the fields of mathematics, probability and statistics.It is true that Skidelsky limits his discussion of the TP in his first volume because he wanted to make an extended discussion of itin the second volume.Unfortunately,the treatment of the TP in volume II is badly marred by a number of mathematical errors.The interested potential book buyer is advised to read my review of volume II.Skidelsky fails to mention anywhere in Volume I that Keynes is the founder of the interval estimate approach to probability.In general,excluding the cases of symmetry and series or sequences composed of homogeneous frequency data,it takes two numbers,not one,to correctly specify an estimate of probability.A probability estimate is thus made up of a lower bound and an upper bound.Further,Keynes specified a clearcut approximation method based on the original work of George Boole in chapters 15 and 17 of the TP.The reader should note that all of this material is present in Keynes's 1907 and 1909 fellowship theses that he submitted to Cambridge University.Also present in these theses is an index created to measure the weight of the evidence,w.Keynes used different terms to describe weight,such as value,before settling for the term weight in the final published 1921 version.w measure the completeness of the relevant, potential evidence upon which a decision maker is going to base an estimate of probability.w is defined on the unit interval between 0 and 1,i.e.,0<=w<=1.Finally,Skidelsky ignores Keynes's conventional coefficient of risk and weight,c.Keynes presented this coefficient in both the 1907 thesis and the 1909 thesis ,which was accepted.This coefficient is the first time in history that a decision rule incorporated nonlinear probability preferences, as well as the weight of the evidence ,or what D.Ellsberg later called the ambiguity of the evidencein a 1961 Quarterly Journal of Economics article.

Love first, Philosophy second, Poetics third,Politics fourth
This profoundly researched and uncensored (sexually speaking) biography gives us a fascinating look into a highly privileged group of people in England when the British Empire was at its zenith. Half (sic) of the world's trade was financed by British credits in 1914.
It pictures the education of young Keynes, groomed by his parents for the highest civil duties, his acceptance in the exclusive Cambridge Apostles Circle (a main discussion point was Higher Sodomy) and his membership of the, in all aspects, anarchic Bloomsbury group. It shows without restaint Keynes' (homo)sexual awakening and his conventional (based on the Gold Standard) beginnings as an economist.
In the meantime, this book reveals the functioning of the British elitist School system (Eton, Cambridge) as well as the 'moral' environment of this period: the death of God and the birth of mass democracy.
Prof. Skidelsky's book contains a wealth of information on e.g. the conservative reasoning behind the Gold Standard, Utilitarianism or Moore's essentialistic, but influential, ethic system.
He shows us Keynes as a fundamental nationalist: 'it is better to have Englishmen running the world than foreigners'.
But nothwithstanding his exhausting efforts, he saw Britain and mainland Europe sinking under the war debts and being taken over by the US as world power, which was effectively controlled by one man, J.P. Morgan.
He attacked severely the Versailles Treaty but was devastated that politicians preferred suicidal short-time re