Was Keynes an Economist?
Well, if I garden on the weekends, am I a gardener? In this sense John Maynard Keynes would indeed be an economist.
On the other hand, in science we might expect some "weeding-out" process analogous to natural selection that kills off bad ideas and promotes good ideas. Did Keynes go through this process? Or did his prominence come through some other channel? The historical record is pretty clear -- Keynes is a naked emperor crowned by bureaucrats.
Keynes' resume is fairly sordid for an alleged economist: after bouncing around India aimlessly, his rich Dad fixed him up a lectureship at Cambridge (not a professorship; even rich Dads can only do so much), which led to a minor government job. Keynes himself spent much of his time essentially day trading, which he was very bad at. He wiped out twice, in the process severely denting his fathers' fortune. Lesson? Lousy economists shouldn't day-trade.
Once in government, Keynes found his game. Context was everything in Keynes' political rise: pre-World War I both the US and UK were afflicted by a cabal of power-hungry totalitarians (who variantly called themselves socialists or fascists -- yes, Virginia, fascism is socialism). These totalitarians wanted government to control the economy, as a lever to controlling all of society. The Anglo-American totalitarians greatest victories were placing Woodrow Wilson in the White House, and Asquith and George (aided notably by Churchill) in Westminster. This gang pushed hard for World War I as a way to nationalize the economy. They hoped that, once nationalized, they could keep control after the war. They were right, as it turned out, although they needed a second World War to cement their gains.
The economic "theories" of these cranks had been long-regarded as foolish, and the totalitarians needed intellectual cover to sell their push for government control of the economy. And this useful intellectual was the dilletante day trader Keynes, now firmly on the government teat. Trading on Keynes' affiliation, the cabal promoted his ideas heavily, and promoted Keynes himself quickly up the ranks of the government.
So, to answer the question whether Keynes should be called an economist, I'd argue that he should not. Rather, he was a good company man, doing his bit for his employer, the government. More of an effective marketer than an actual ideas man. And he was an effective marketer, driving out centuries of economic thought and replacing it with vulgar pro-government silliness.
In fairness, economists should have seen it coming: the field of economics is simply too useful to escape the iron fist. Governments have long craved the innocent babe of economics, and Keynes helped them snatch it. In other words, economics was sooner or later going to get conquered, and Keynes was merely the human face of conquest of economics by the totalitarian state.
So, what was so attractive about Keynes' "theories" to the totalitarians? Keynes was peddling two very old economic fallacies: the belief that spending and not production is the key to wealth. And the belief that economies are inherently unstable, wayward children in need of the wise father's rod.
The first of these, the spending fallacy, rears up constantly in history simply because it's so intuitive, while the inherent instability argument had always been a favorite of doomsday types like Marx.
The spending fallacy is useful because it puts vote-buying on a pedestal equal to factory-building. And the instability fallacy is useful because it implies that blindingly stupid bureaucrats would somehow be good custodians of our lives. It's fun to recall that Senator Ted Stevens, of "series of tubes" fame, was a senior internet regulator. And that Alan Greenspan was "shocked" that the 2008 Crisis happened. Wise fathers indeed.
Why does this all matter to investors? Because, if Keynes' ideas were the result of a well-formed and rigorous academic evolution than we might take them more seriously. We might treat them as legitimate theories about the economy, and look for the good with the bad.
On the other hand, if Keynesianism is simply marketing for totalitarian economics, then there's no reason we would think it's actually "correct" in any sense that matters to investors.
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