Economics
1883 to 1946, Cambridge
Demand, depression, and the role of the state.
Start learning John →Keynes’s revolution: that economies can get stuck in slumps not because they cannot produce, but because there is not enough spending to buy what they produce.
Keynes’s unsettling discovery that saving - the great private virtue - can become a public vice, and that one person’s spending is another’s job.
Keynes’s prescription that when private demand collapses, the government should spend to fill the gap - even on seemingly wasteful projects - to restart the economy.
Keynes’s insight that economic life is ruled not by cool calculation but by psychology, confidence, and herd instinct in the face of an unknowable future.
How Keynes’s ideas remade economic policy, were overthrown by the crises of the 1970s, and came roaring back in the crash of 2008 - a verdict still unsettled.
epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.