John Maynard Keynes

About the author

John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes (1883–1946), is widely regarded as the father of macroeconomics and one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. Educated at King's College, Cambridge, where he took a mathematics degree in 1904, he built a revolutionary framework during the Great Depression, arguing that aggregate demand — not free-market automatism — determines employment and output. He championed fiscal and monetary intervention to counter recessions, and later turned decisively protectionist, rejecting Ricardian free-trade theory.

His ideas became the foundation of Keynesian and, after his death, New Keynesian economics.