POLITICAL THEORY - John Maynard Keynes 

John Maynard Keynes opposed the creation of the London Marathon. He thought we'd all die in the long run.

people getting super salty in the comment section I think we need to remember that this video is not attempting to say Keynes was completely right, but simply explaining the ideas in an easy to digest way. no economist worth his salt should insist one economic idea will always work. that said, the very field of macroeconomics basically started from Keynes, and to ignore his contributions would be willfully ignorant.

"When the facts change, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?" 20th CENTURY BURN

"If the facts change, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?" I make up alternative facts.

This is a pretty good video on Keynes. Usually its hyperbiased one way or the other. I would like to see more economists.

Not to be confused with Maynard James Keenan, singer of Tool

that last line was fire

"Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back" -John Maynard Keynes

came on youtube to avoid my economic undergraduate studies and this comes on notif 😞

When I began college in 1957 I was taking a course in Economics 101...and I subscribed then and I subscribe now; to the John Maynard Keynes macro economics theory....it still rings true today!

That last line brings it home so well.

The issue with Kaynes ideas, and why they cannot be implemented, especially in a world today was mentioned in the very beginning of the video: Corruption; or as it is more commonly refered to today: Lobbyism. Keynes has this idea that the state is some sort of omniscient beign, not simply an institution run by a lot of individuals. He argues that the state will do what is best for the nation, and that makes sense, if you percieve the state as an almighty and benevolent organ. But it is not. The state is run by people, who are just as prone to corruption as anybody, that has grown up in a capitalist society, where self-interest and profits are centerpage. Think about it: Would you decline an enormous sum of money, offered in trade for simply implementing some policies that a certain company or industry was asking of you? In the recent years, lobbyism has only increased, and we will never see the return of Keynesianism as a dominating economic model, or the wellfare state. Yes, modern economists might propose Keynesianistic ideas these days, but the bankers and CEOs of the multinational corporations care little for the effect their profiteering ventures leaves on the different nations.

Wow, I love your videos! Maybe you could make some about history? I think it's very important to understand historical developments to get what is going on currently in the world.

What a wonderful explanation! So easy to understand and it all comes alive in the pictures :) Thank you for your videos!

Could you do one on Hannah Arendt? Her work is forever fascinating and ever more necessary.

I love it when you talk about people. would love to see more videos like this!

I love the school of life.

Just a few extra comments to add to this succinct summary on Keynes. His "Economic Consequences of the Peace" has remarkable psychological insight into Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Wilson and predicted the inevitability of WW2 nearly 20 years before it happened. A brilliant beautifully-written Tour de Force. On the minus side, he was pretty dismissive about Social Credit with economic remedies similar to his own. I think that he was rather mean in the General Theory to Henry George et al - and sneakily diverted attention from them by going back to Mandeville's obscure and ancient Parable of the Bees as a primitive progenitor of Keynesianism. He well knew the workings of Social Credit because when working on the 1929 Liberal Party manifesto he collaborated closely with a leading Social Creditor - Eimar O'Duffy - one of the few authors whose empathy and savage wit exceeded even the great Keynes himself.

This is such an amazing video.. Gave me a whole different way of thinking economically. Thank you

Excellent! Well done! YES, flexibility AS WELL as stimulus is often required!

Could you do one on Noam Chomsky? Maybe not even on his politics but on his contribution to cognitive science and the philosophical implications of Universal Grammar. Thanks.

8:03 I imagine this complex system of accounting is a bit more complicated than quadratic equations ;)

This is just such an awesome presentation on Keynes and Keynesianism, just look at FDR and USA growth in 1930's, 1940's pre world war 2, he was a witness to the madness of the Versailles agreement post WWI

So good. Loved this video, the story, the animation, the delivery. Quite excellent!

I am so greatful to live in a time and place where I have free access to such intellectual knowledge. Thank you very much

I will have to watch this a few more times. Thanks, I feel inspired by you all the time to make a report on a variety of topics just for fun.

Your videos are a godsend for capping off High School economics lessons.

This is an excellent and well-made video and of high quality for such a short film it is certainly worthy of my acclaim. I had always wanted to learn about Keynesian economics for months now but forgot about it or postponed it. I watched a video about it produced by Khan Academy but the video was exceptionally boring and too slow-paced for my liking and I exited after a couple of minutes of watch time. This video however was amazing and it got me hooked and easily explained the entire concept of Keynesian economics without boring me or using complex terms I don't know the definition of, thank you.

Keynes didn't believe government spending in recessions paid for themselves, neither do modern economists. He, like modern economists still do, believe governments should run surpluses during normal times to make up for the debt incurred during recessionary periods. Also, Keynes didn't give a shit about the levels of regulation or size of the state in general. In fact, he was quite conservative. He wanted to smooth the business cycle, that is all. The whole last 2-3 minutes of this video is pretty bad. Keynes idea's weren't "discredited". They were simply updated/changed, as any incomplete scientific theory is.

Nice, have been waiting for a Keynes video.

Thanks! Right a week before my economic studies exam!

GREAT video!!! Well explained and easy to understand - and from what i know of Mr. Keynes's ideas, accurate!! Kudos.

As much as I like these videos, I love the comments section more!!. Many have commented that economics is not an exact science like science/engineering. I'm an engineer myself with R&D experience. I say even science/engineering is not so exact. Most of our models don't fit the experimental data which we overcome by 'calibration' that requires feedback from experiments. There are many problems that are inherently unstable and chaotic. It is impossible to develop an accurate model for them. Fluid dynamics is one such example. Any predictive model needs correction inputs from the system. There is no model that is absolutely predictive simply because you don't know all the actors and their behavior a priori or even posterior. So is economics especially when it involves as fickle as human actors involved in it. As Albert Einstein once famously said, "All models are wrong; Some are useful". When the greatest scientist waves his hand at modeling, it deserves some credit.

Whenever I get interested in a certain topic, that topic starts to pop up in various settings such as the school of life or some online magazines I follow. It was only yesterday I asked a friend of mine what keynes brought to economics. Weird.

I love how this video marks the passage of time with the use of Automobiles. Such a nice touch.

was literally about to ask you a few days ago to make a video about this guy. you must have read my mind

"When the facts change, I alter my conclusion. What do you do, sir?" if only more people would think that way...

Just a little interesting fact - the house shown at 1:25 is 46 Gordon Square in London, which is about a five minute walk from The School of Life. Even closer is 36 Tavistock Place, where Lenin once lived, which is about thirty seconds away. I'm lucky enough to work in this area, hopefully Alain will have his own blue plaque here one day.

Missed this kind of videos, the ones that actually brought me to the channel 😃

Hello, thank you for good content! I highly appreciate your channel

Keynes gets such a bad rap, when actually is the creator of the greatest economic policy of history. Thanks to his thought, capitalistic world (both developed and developing) grew fast and kept stable for 30 years. Severe recessions reappeared when his model was scrapped in the 1970s.

Could you do Friedman next ? To complete the, Marx, Keynes and Friedman economics trilogy :)

I was waiting for one on Keynes! yay! finally

I think you should be awarded for your lovely voice.

Still wating for Rothbard, Menschen!

Well explained. Thank you!

Was waiting for so long for this video!

These school of life videos are a revelation! Philosophy has always been beyond my ken but I see now that philosophers and theorists are as human as I am, only with slightly bigger brains perhaps.

A video about John Stuart Mill in the "political theory" playlist would be great

"We all die in the long run" also means "we have to think about those who will come after us and how many Hitlers and Stalins they's face in their lives" (paraphrased). Keynes is the creator of modern economics. He was also a real scholar in the field - "when the facts change ...". Among the greats like Karl Marx and Adam Smith. Marx, btw, had profound admiration for Smith and he wrote this in "The Notebooks" (that was published only in 1932 and is where he describes the methods and sources for writing The Capital). Marx understood the facts Adam Smith had were different than the facts he had like all honest scholars should do. Socialists and neo-liberals are members of faith based cults who select only the facts that prove their faith right. 'Socialism' here is the classic definition of "ownership of means of production by the workers etc .." and not the definition that is often used by Bernie Sanders, for instance (imho, the best politician alive) meaning "a preoccupation with the dignity of all people in a society". BTW, Adam Smith is blamed for things he never said like "free markets" since he was for State intervention and regulation of the economy because he believed in "free and fair competition" - the "free" means "free from distortions like monopolies and other unfair advantages".

Thank u so much for this video.

Been waiting on this one for a while

I missed those maracas

Keynes was correct that governments do have it in their power to bring about sustainable economic growth, but the mechanisms he advanced were critically flawed. A main problem with Keynes was his failure to understand that the rent of land was claiming a higher and higher proportion of the wealth produced by labor and capital goods. The escalating price of locations in major cities should have given him cause to revisit Ricardo's work in developing the law of rent, expanded beyond agricultural land into all locations, rural and urban, and land-like assets (e.g., the broadcast spectrum and even take-off and landing slots at airports. His perspectives remained neoclassical, ignoring the fact that the price mechanism does not clear the markets for land as it does for labor and capital goods (and, depending on the extent of government control, for credit).

In the long run we are all read That's iconic It's not something we can say everytime but in some situation it is important

Great video! There should be a post about him in your website, i couldn't find it.

Just a note. The political left is very critical of Keynes. We dont want to soften capitalism -- we want to supplant it with socialism

Excellent video. Not because I agree with Keynes, but this is a great tool for educating and refreshing our knowledge. Thanks for these videos SoL :)

Thanks for this video, very helpful for my economics essay!

I don't find Keynes economical philosophy attractive but I did enjoy the video as well as the opportunity to view economics from another's perspective. Thank you kindly

Doing an essay on the National Minimum Wage and I'm doing a section on Keynesian Wage Theory. This was extremely helpful, thank you School of Life :D

Keynes's ideas were prophetic. Behavioural economics (scientific evidence about how human actually think) supports and complements many of his initiatives.

I love this channel so much that i use these videos for college

your channel is just amazing

You should do Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His legacy is still being written

Would love to see School Of Life cover Anarchism.

He is the main reason I became so enamored with Economics as a high schooler. The mere fact that he focused on the middle ground between socialism an capitalism is what made his work so appealing to me.

Very informative and useful video

might I suggest a book: 'Keynes: The Return of the Master,' by Robert Skidelsky

He was indeed a great thinker -unfortunately his ideas are often twisted and abused by governments and modern economists, who naturally will stick to the theories that grant them more leeway and power, creating a good dose of human suffering in the process.

Loved it! Please do more economic/capitalism videos

Great video!

Interesting choice of the verb 'discovered' in the description when referencing his ideas- it is a whole other philosophical argument whether ideas and mathematical laws are discovered or invented.

Stagflation could have had nothing to do with the OPEC oil embargo...

Thank you so much for making keyens video and hayek video !!!!!!!♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️

It's so great you took the high road and stayed positive with both the Keynes and Smith videos. Very well done. Also you might wanna do an update after the stimulus of the Corvid bailout, haha.

Keynesian economics believes that in times of a high business cycle(economy doing really well) we should raise taxes and cut spending so that we can stimulate in a low Business cycle(bad economy). Society, politicians and this video don´t focus on the first part. People like the goverment helping them but don´t want to pay extra tax for a possible downturn. If people can´t accept higher taxes during a high business cycle they won´t receive help during bad times. I hope people will vote more for politicians who promis to raise taxes and cut spending but that won´t happen.

"In the long run, we are all dead"

great work. really. outstanding!! could you please mention the references too?

good video 👍 thank you

Do one on Milton Friedman !!!

Keynsian thinking always made sense to me because it was driven by the idea of preventing extreme economic failures. Neoliberal thinking just seems to rely too heavily on "markets will solve everything" - a very irrational and faith, rather than evidence based, thinking.

Yea! Thanks for posting an intellectual video!

Please, put subtitles in spansh. Thanks for such good content.

My man Keynes!!!

Word.

Amazing channel

Great video.

As always, a bunch of people in the comments that don't know what the hell they're talking about. Much like religion, everyone has an opinion on economics.

Hayek under Regan/Thatcher gave us all the greatest rebellion against the establishment we have ever seen. Early punk rock. :)

Good edited video. Thumps up

Brilliant, summary...'Not Dogmatic', when in discussion about economics its the phrase I use about Keynes, so thanks for the confirmation. Friends and I always agreed that "Philosophy should always be written in pencil', and so should economic theory, it maybe considered a science, but its not an absolute....yet...

This guy was brilliant. This is where MMT comes from

I think you left out the part where he recommends that, in good economic times or upswings of growth, that governments should decrease spending, and allow the markets to do their thing, maintain or increase taxes and pay down its deficits...woeful and/ or willful obfuscation?

You guys have physical locations!? I can't believe I never knew. I hope you'll introduce online courses for the rest of us someday. I'd be willing to pay a significant amount of money for that.

wonderful ,pithy explanations for students and lay people.

Keynes' most serious analytical failure was to discount out of hand the power of land markets and land speculations as a fundamental driver of cycles of boom-to-bust. He ignored changing land use; and, in particular, the rising rents extracted by owners of centrally-located or resource-laden lands.

How often do you read and can you give a tour of your library/what you read. Also can you talk about Neoliberalism.

I had never heard of the new neoclassical synthesis before this video!

8:57 that's ridiculous to point to that as result of establishment of IMF. Those changes were more in spite of his ideas, than their direct results.