John Maynard Keynes - Wikipedia

On July 7, 1942, John Maynard Keynes takes his seat in the British House Of Lords as Baron Keynes of Tilton after being knighted. From the article:

"John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes[2] CB FBA (/keɪnz/ KAYNZ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946), was a British economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and was one of the most influential economists of the 20th century and the founder of modern macroeconomic theory.[3][4][5][6] His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, challenging the ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. He instead argued that aggregate demand determined the overall level of economic activity and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. Keynes's magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, was published in 1936.

The leading Western economies adopted Keynes's policy recommendations before the outbreak of World War II, and in the two decades following Keynes's death in 1946, almost all capitalist governments had done so. Keynes's influence waned in the 1970s, partly as a result of the stagflation that plagued the Anglo-American economies during that decade, and partly because of criticism of Keynesian policies by Milton Friedman and other monetarists.[7] He and other economists had disputed the ability of government to regulate the business cycle favourably with fiscal policy.[8]

The advent of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 caused a resurgence in Keynesian thought. Keynesian economics provided the theoretical underpinning for economic policies undertaken in response to the crisis by President Barack Obama of the United States, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, and other heads of governments.[9]

When Time magazine included Keynes among its Most Important People of the Century in 1999, it said that "his radical idea that governments should spend money they don't have may have saved capitalism."[10] The Economist has described Keynes as "Britain's most famous 20th-century economist."[11] In addition to being an economist, Keynes was also a civil servant, a director of the Bank of England, and a part of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals."