In a very real sense, we're all Keynesians now, innit? But what, exactly, do we know about the Great Man? Thanks to the benefits of the last remnants of a bog-standard comprehensive education in Scotland in the 80s, I have dim memories of reading about him, and thought the salient points should be shared, in the few moments while we're waiting for another article from Andrew Lillico.
First, Keynes married a ballerina from Russia. But don't worry! He also had lots of sex with lots of different men. A true Bloomsburyite and the very template for the modern Conservative Party. A typical diary entry from the 1920s might read:
Solved the problem of spending in a recession. Dinner with Virginia: v tiresome. Some sort of stream of consciousness about lighthouses. Met Duncan later for a spot of billiards.
Did you know, however, that he was also a brilliant statistician? In 1921 he published the Treatise on Probability, and what's more, he wasn't completely wrong (less frequent an occurrence in the technical literature than one might wish). He published his treatise before Kolmogorov published the axioms, which was quite smart, really. The first and only Archer Axiom is that probability is cool, and so we conclude that Keynes was cool, with probability one.
So, he was mates with Virginia, Duncan, Lytton et al.; he understood
and could manipulate the charms of the probability calculus; he made
some fairly successful contributions to economics (apparently): but his
crowning achievement was, of course, to come up with two of the most
successful and universally applicable put-downs of all time.
Spare a thought for Alistair Darling this morning. Big day on Monday! How will he respond to those niggardly Tory concerns that by ramping up public debt, far from saving the future, he's merely endebting it further? Arncha gonna have to put up taxes, Alistair, darling? Step forward Dr Keynes: In the long run, we are all dead. Et voila! Collapse of stout party.
And where would all the bird-brained columnists of Fleet Street be, without JMK? Iain Dale went to the effort the other day of posting the sequence of mutually contradictory articles written by Anatole Kaletsky about Gordon Brown in the last few months. It's glorious. But it's not only Anatole who suffers the inability to hold onto a proposition for more than 48 hours: many of his Fleet Street colleagues are similarly afflicted. Who could not shed a tear at the peregrinations of Polly Townbee, who's gone from Gordon Brown Is Our Saviour to Gordon Brown Is Destroying The Progressive Left to It's Really All Over Now Guys We're Finished to Gordon Brown Is Our Saviour And Anyone Who Says Otherwise Is A Traitor To The Progressive Left, in less than six months?
I could be wrong, but I have a strong mental impression that Ms Toynbee sleeps in a revolving hammock, strapped in tight, twirling through the night, round and round and round, eyes glazed and staring, in favour of Gordon Brown when she's facing the ceiling, despising his every act when she's facing the floor, on and on and on, feverishly and repeatedly mouthing to herself Keynes' best defence for journalists who seek merely to reflect today's babble, rather than deal with anything as contentious as an inference: When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
I think Polly and the others are missing JMK's point though: he did, at least, have a mind to change.
