The Man Who Predicted Nazi Germany

[malaise]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/07/opinion/keynes-economic-consequences-peace.html
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On Dec. 8, 1919, Macmillan Press published a book by a relatively obscure British Treasury official who had resigned from the government in protest over the Versailles treaty that brought the epochal trauma of the First World War to its conclusion.

The small treatise, the official wrote, sought to explain “the grounds of his objection to the treaty, or rather to the whole policy of the conference towards the economic problems of Europe.” A conservative print of 5,000 copies seemed right for a technocrat’s dissent, which featured meticulously detailed passages that pored over the history and prospects of things like Germany’s coal production and export markets.

The book, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” turned out to be a phenomenon. It swiftly went through six printings, was translated into a dozen languages, sold over 100,000 copies, and brought world fame to its 36-year-old author, John Maynard Keynes.

A brilliant and indefatigable scholar, public intellectual, journalist, government adviser and champion of the arts, Keynes would be at the center of things for the balance of his life. The Keynesian revolution reinvented economics in the 1930s, and continues to shape the field today. Keynes, again representing the British Treasury during World War II, was the principal intellectual architect of postwar international order. But he began his career in dissent.

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How ironic that the Bretton-Woods agreement rejected Keynes and opted for the US backed multilaterals who would fuck us all up with neo-liberalism.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/nov/18/lord-keynes-international-monetary-fund
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Poor old Lord Keynes. The world's press has spent the past week blackening his name. Not intentionally: most of the dunderheads reporting the G20 summit that took place over the weekend really do believe that he proposed and founded the International Monetary Fund. It's one of those stories that passes unchecked from one journalist to another.

The truth is more interesting. At the UN's Bretton Woods conference in 1944, John Maynard Keynes put forward a much better idea. After it was thrown out, Geoffrey Crowther - then the editor of the Economist magazine - warned that "Lord Keynes was right ... the world will bitterly regret the fact that his arguments were rejected." But the world does not regret it, for almost everyone - the Economist included - has forgotten what he proposed.