how do you think he will rank in the history of economic theory or thought
as a man with a great many ideas who knew very little economics
meant literally too
see he knew nothing but Marshallian economics
he was completely unaware of what was going on elseware
he even knew very little about nineteenth century economic history his
interests were very largely guided by aesthetic appeal
and he hated the nineteenth century
and therefore knew very little about it
even about its scientific literature he was a really great expert on the
Elizabethan age
I'm absolutely astounded
that you say that John Maynard Keynes really did not know the economic literature
very little very little
even within the English tradition he did know very little of the
great monetary writers of the nineteenth century
he would know nothing about Henry Thornton
he knew a little about Ricardo of course the famous things but
he could have found any number of antecedents of his
inflationary ideas in the 1820's and 1830's
and when I told him about it it was all new to him
how did he react
was he sheepish? oh no not in the least
he was much too self assured and amused?
convinced that
what other people could have said about the subject was not frightfully important
....
at the end well not in the end there was a period just after he had written the General Theory where
he was so convinced he had re-done the whole science
that he was rather contemptuous of anything which had been done before
and did he maintain that confidence to the end
I can't say because I said before we'd almost stopped talking economics
great many other subjects
his general history of ideas and so on we were
interested
and you know I
I don't want you to get the impression that I underestimated him
as a brain he was one of the most intelligent and most original
thinkers I have known
but economics was just a sideline for him
and he had an amazing memory
he was extraordinarily widely read
but economics was not really his main interest- well his own economics
was he was convinced he could recreate the subject
and he rather had a contempt for
most of the other economists
does this tie in with your
Two Kinds of Minds you wrote in Encounter some years ago
well curiously enough I would say Keynes was rather my type of mind
and not the other
he is certainly could not have been described as a master of his subject
which describes the other type he was an
intuitive thinker with a
very wide knowledge in many fields
who'd never felt
that economics was weighty enough to
he just took it for granted that
Marshall's textbook
contained everything one needs to know about the subject
there was a certain
arrogance of Cambridge economics about and they thought they were the centre of
the world and if you have learned Cambridge economics there is nothing else worth learning
I'm interested in your earlier comment about the fact
that here is a man of immense intelligence
great imagination
wide learning and so on
and yet was not an economist and i'm not clear whether you mean
he didn't have the kind of mind that excels in economics just as
mathematics say you can find people who are brilliant but who given mathematics
are just hopeless
but do you mean he didn't have the kind of mind that makes for first rate
economists
oh he had I mean if he had given his whole mind
to economics he could have become
a master of economics
of the
existing body
but there were certain
parts of economic theory which he
had never been interested in
he had never thought about the theory of capital
he was very shaky even on the theory of of international trade
he was well informed on contemporary monetary theory but even there
he did not know such things as Henry Thornton or Wicksell
and of course his great effect was he did not read any foreign language except french
the whole german literature was inaccessible to him
he did curiously enough review Mises book on money but
later admitting that in german he could only understand what he knew already
what he had known before he read the book