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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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John Maynard Keynes
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(1883–1946, baron 1942) Economist whose views were so influential that from World War II to the late 1970s 'Keynesian economics' were the widely accepted orthodoxy. He first came to prominence with The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), in which he accurately predicted that the terms of the *Versailles Treaty would cripple Germany. His most influential work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), was a response to the long *Depression of the 1930s which seemed to deny the classical theory of economic cycles.
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Keynes argued that governments could spend their way out of recession by doing what the free market was supposed to do when labour was cheap – invest (by commissioning work on public projects) and encourage consumers to spend (by increasing the available *money supply). A reaction against this approach, on the grounds that it leads to *inflation, became influential in Britain during the 1980s when *monetarism was for a while an equally strong orthodoxy. Keynes was a prominent member of the *Bloomsbury group.
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