There Must Be Something in That Cambridge Water
That high pitched noise you hear is the shrieks of those who are Shocked! and Disgusted! by historian Niall Ferguson’s drawing a connection between Keynes’, umm, Bohemianism and his economic views. That moral avatar Henry Blodget (banned from the securities industry for life, by the way) describes what Ferguson says as “bizarre and offensive”:
Speaking at the Tenth Annual Altegris Conference in Carlsbad, Calif., in front of a group of more than 500 financial advisors and investors, Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’ famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead. Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of “poetry” rather than procreated. The audience went quiet at the remark. Some attendees later said they found the remarks offensive.
Well, this idea didn’t spring first from Ferguson’s fertile imagination-or febrile imagination, as his critics would have it. Joseph Schumpeter, leaving out the gay bits, made essentially the same point in his chapter on Keynes in his Ten Great Economists From Marx to Keynes: “He was childless and his philosophy of life was essentially a short-run philosophy.” That was written in 1951, and of course homosexuality just wasn’t mentioned then. One could argue that ironically, the greater acceptance of homosexuality is precisely why Ferguson today could make explicit what Schumpeter only hinted at in the benighted 50s.
Schumpeter was a giant as an economist. He knew Keynes. He knew Keynes’s milieu. He was one of the greatest historians of economic thought. He was also unconventional in his private life, though in a different way. So he speaks with some authority. Not that one should automatically defer to such authority, but when someone like Schumpeter says it, you know it’s not the unconsidered musings of an ignorant man. It is the considered opinion of a highly knowledgeable one.
But he was also a furriner at Harvard, so that must be it.
Schumpeter attributes other aspects of Keynes’s thought to his personal history. The quoted line is in a section that argues that Keynes was a patriotic Englishman, and that his scientific and policy works were not so coincidentally closely aligned with Britain’s interests:
Like the old free-traders, he always exalted what was at any moment truth and wisdom for England into truth and wisdom for all times and places.
Ironic, isn’t it, inasmuch as Ferguson is a rather outspoken admirer of the British Empire?
The fact that Keynes married, and that his wife apparently miscarried, does raise questions about the theory that Schumpeter advanced and Ferguson repeated (if you assume the child was Keynes’s-quite a leap in itself). But neither gainsays the fact that Keynes’s view was, clearly, focused on the short-run, and expressed virtually no interest in the implications of his policy recommendations for future generations.
This controversy raises the question: what is the point of the biographies of intellectuals, anyways, if there is no connection between their personal lives and their intellectual works? Unless such a connection exists, intellectual biography that explores private lives is nothing more than People Magazine for eggheads. Keynes’ biographer Skidelsky goes into lurid detail about Keynes’s private life, and concludes that it was an important part of his worldview. (Skidelsky puts forward some thoughts on the role of intellectual biography here.) Skidelsky was able to document in such lurid detail precisely because Keynes recorded his exploits in such lurid detail. It was obviously something very important to him. Given this importance, is therefore hardly outlandish to suggest that there is a nexus between his personal life and philosophies, and his professional writings.
All that said, there is a difference between understanding-or at least conjecturing about-why Keynes wrote what he wrote and determining whether what he wrote is good economics or a good guide to public policy. Making the latter determination is a matter of logic, mathematics, and empirical analysis. If Keynes’s inspiration came from a ouija board, but turned out to be logically airtight and empirically validated, so what? If it turns out to be logically flawed and empirically invalidated, what possible difference could its intellectual-or psychological-origins matter? (I am in the latter camp, obviously, regarding Keynes’s work.)
I sense that the hysterical attack on Ferguson for his views on Keynes reflects the left’s view that Keynesianism must be defended at all costs, and anything and anyone that could raise any doubts about Keynes must be terminated, with extreme prejudice. Add to that the very PC urge to shout down anyone who dares express the view that sexual orientation could influence worldview in a negative way-the selfsame people are often quite willing to claim that it can affect it in a positive way. So I guess orientation can affect thought and behavior, but only in a good way. Uh-huh.
Note that the question to which Ferguson was responding was not about the theoretical rigor or empirical content of The General Theory. He was asked to contrast Keynes’s philosophy with that of Burke. He answered. You can find things that Skidelsky-an ardent admirer of Keynes-has written that would support what Ferguson said.
All in all, I consider this a tempest in a teapot. I really couldn’t care less about the connection, if any, between Keynes’s sexual orientation and lack of progeny and his theories: what I care about is the connection between his theories and reality. And that connection is very tenuous, in my view.
This tempest has all the usual roots of a faux controversy. Ferguson is a bête noire on the left, notorious for his muscular, and at times brutal, advocacy of conservative (more properly, classical liberal) positions. He said something that those who despise him can jump on. And they are jumping on it, taking offense with relish. (By the way, I find any criticism of an argument that focuses on its alleged offensiveness to be inherently subjective, often manipulative, and revealing of an inability to attack its substance. Highly unpersuasive, in other words. I’d also note that he gave the remarks at a conference put on by an investment firm, and I imagine that most of the audience was high net worth individuals and their investment advisors. Supposedly-though the source for this obviously dislikes Ferguson-the audience was uncomfortable after Ferguson’s remark, and many were offended. So much for the rich being right wing knuckle draggers with too much money.)
I was surprised and disappointed to read that Ferguson made a fulsome apology. I seriously thought that he wouldn’t give a flying ‘f, and would in fact double down. But perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, given the history at Harvard.
I am counting down the seconds until the demands that he be banished from Harvard start flying, apology or no. Liberal in Good Standing Larry Summers was defenestrated as Harvard President, for crissakes, of uttering a politically incorrect remark. And this after he groveled. If they can drive out the President of the university, and a former Treasury Secretary in a Democratic administration, eliminating the mere Tisch Professor of History, a conservative no less, should be child’s play.
While they’re at it, maybe they should posthumously de-tenure Schumpeter. But why stop there? For having the temerity to utter such a politically incorrect statement, by all rights they should re-enact what was done with Cromwell upon the Restoration. You know, dig up his corpse, and draw and quarter it. For what he said, he obviously deserves nothing less.
Libertarian economist/political philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe was pretty much chased out of UNLV for saying basically the same thing.
Comment by John — May 4, 2013 @ 5:46 pm
I smell fear. The more an argument relies on emotion and ad hominem attacks, the sooner it will be proven wrong. Unfortunately with economics, the consequences incurred until the argument is disproven are beyond enormous, and affect everyone, including those who just want to survive in this world. It amazes me that those liberals who want to “help” the common man are too invested in being intellectually “right” than in making sure their ideas provably (empirically) improve the common welfare.
Comment by dh — May 4, 2013 @ 6:02 pm
When you resort to ad-hominem attacks and then start whining about the political correctness police it means you ran out of actual arguments. It’s to Ferguson’s credit that he only did the former.
P.S.
Your use of the term “hysterical attack” in this context is offensive.
Comment by aaa — May 5, 2013 @ 2:00 am
Here is my fear. Gays have succeeded in making themselves a protected class. Now that Keynes is out of the closet-if we criticize his theory we are criticizing him. So we must be racist, anti-gay, haters.
But because I believe in Classical economics, I already was grouped in that cadre.
Comment by Jeff — May 5, 2013 @ 5:13 pm
[…] Nevertheless, I would agree that but in the long term we’re all dead is a useful counterblast to that view. If you believe, as Keynes did (and as Krugman et al do today) that there are actions we can take that will make things better for people right now, today, then it’s a very good way of dismissing those who insist that it’ll all be fine in a decade or two so why bother? There’s nothing quite as petty as academia of course and my supposition, based on that admittedly iconoclastic reading of Keynes’ “long term” comment, is that it was a dig at Schumpeter (the leading Austrian economist) and one that Schumpeter couldn’t resist having a dig at in return in his academic obituary of Keynes (most of which is almost excessively laudatory I should point out). I think Craig Pirrong has the right idea about what to look out for next. […]
Pingback by Niall Ferguson’s Keynes Was Childless, Gay, So Don’t Worry About The Long … – Forbes | The Latest News — May 6, 2013 @ 1:59 am
NPR’s Plant Money pointed this out years ago and added anti semitism to J M Keynes background.
Comment by Bob — May 6, 2013 @ 8:39 am
Like Burke, Keynes had but one child. In Burke’s case, the child died, unmarried, before Burke.
In Keynes’ case, the child died before birth, a miscarrage.
And re: your previous musings about Obama’s supposed dithering about Syrian chemical weapons, UN investigators say there is not yet conclusive proof of the use of Sarin, and what scanty evidence there is points to use by the Glorious Syrian Freedom Fighters(TM)
http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22424188
Comment by Rkka — May 6, 2013 @ 10:08 am
[…] Nevertheless, I would agree that but in the long term we’re all dead is a useful counterblast to that view. If you believe, as Keynes did (and as Krugman et al do today) that there are actions we can take that will make things better for people right now, today, then it’s a very good way of dismissing those who insist that it’ll all be fine in a decade or two so why bother? There’s nothing quite as petty as academia of course and my supposition, based on that admittedly iconoclastic reading of Keynes’ “long term” comment, is that it was a dig at Schumpeter (the leading Austrian economist) and one that Schumpeter couldn’t resist having a dig at in return in his academic obituary of Keynes (most of which is almost excessively laudatory I should point out). I think Craig Pirrong has the right idea about what to look out for next. […]
Pingback by Niall Ferguson’s Keynes Was Childless, Gay, So Don’t Worry About The Long … – Forbes | ReliableNewsToday — May 6, 2013 @ 1:12 pm
[…] Nevertheless, I would agree that but in the long term we’re all dead is a useful counterblast to that view. If you believe, as Keynes did (and as Krugman et al do today) that there are actions we can take that will make things better for people right now, today, then it’s a very good way of dismissing those who insist that it’ll all be fine in a decade or two so why bother? There’s nothing quite as petty as academia of course and my supposition, based on that admittedly iconoclastic reading of Keynes’ “long term” comment, is that it was a dig at Schumpeter (the leading Austrian economist) and one that Schumpeter couldn’t resist having a dig at in return in his academic obituary of Keynes (most of which is almost excessively laudatory I should point out). I think Craig Pirrong has the right idea about what to look out for next. […]
Pingback by Niall Ferguson’s Keynes Was Childless, Gay, So Don’t Worry About The Long … – Forbes | TopHeadlinesDaily — May 6, 2013 @ 5:32 pm
[…] Nevertheless, I would agree that but in the long term we’re all dead is a useful counterblast to that view. If you believe, as Keynes did (and as Krugman et al do today) that there are actions we can take that will make things better for people right now, today, then it’s a very good way of dismissing those who insist that it’ll all be fine in a decade or two so why bother? There’s nothing quite as petty as academia of course and my supposition, based on that admittedly iconoclastic reading of Keynes’ “long term” comment, is that it was a dig at Schumpeter (the leading Austrian economist) and one that Schumpeter couldn’t resist having a dig at in return in his academic obituary of Keynes (most of which is almost excessively laudatory I should point out). I think Craig Pirrong has the right idea about what to look out for next. […]
Pingback by Niall Ferguson’s Keynes Was Childless, Gay, So Don’t Worry About The Long … – Forbes | ReliableNewsFlash — May 6, 2013 @ 5:46 pm
[…] Nevertheless, I would agree that but in the long term we’re all dead is a useful counterblast to that view. If you believe, as Keynes did (and as Krugman et al do today) that there are actions we can take that will make things better for people right now, today, then it’s a very good way of dismissing those who insist that it’ll all be fine in a decade or two so why bother? There’s nothing quite as petty as academia of course and my supposition, based on that admittedly iconoclastic reading of Keynes’ “long term” comment, is that it was a dig at Schumpeter (the leading Austrian economist) and one that Schumpeter couldn’t resist having a dig at in return in his academic obituary of Keynes (most of which is almost excessively laudatory I should point out). I think Craig Pirrong has the right idea about what to look out for next. […]
Pingback by Niall Ferguson’s Keynes Was Childless, Gay, So Don’t Worry About The Long … – Forbes | freenewsportal.com — May 6, 2013 @ 6:02 pm
[…] Nevertheless, I would agree that but in the long term we’re all dead is a useful counterblast to that view. If you believe, as Keynes did (and as Krugman et al do today) that there are actions we can take that will make things better for people right now, today, then it’s a very good way of dismissing those who insist that it’ll all be fine in a decade or two so why bother? There’s nothing quite as petty as academia of course and my supposition, based on that admittedly iconoclastic reading of Keynes’ “long term” comment, is that it was a dig at Schumpeter (the leading Austrian economist) and one that Schumpeter couldn’t resist having a dig at in return in his academic obituary of Keynes (most of which is almost excessively laudatory I should point out). I think Craig Pirrong has the right idea about what to look out for next. […]
Pingback by Niall Ferguson’s Keynes Was Childless, Gay, So Don’t Worry About The Long … – Forbes | For Headline News — May 6, 2013 @ 6:58 pm
[…] Nevertheless, I would agree that but in the long term we’re all dead is a useful counterblast to that view. If you believe, as Keynes did (and as Krugman et al do today) that there are actions we can take that will make things better for people right now, today, then it’s a very good way of dismissing those who insist that it’ll all be fine in a decade or two so why bother? There’s nothing quite as petty as academia of course and my supposition, based on that admittedly iconoclastic reading of Keynes’ “long term” comment, is that it was a dig at Schumpeter (the leading Austrian economist) and one that Schumpeter couldn’t resist having a dig at in return in his academic obituary of Keynes (most of which is almost excessively laudatory I should point out). I think Craig Pirrong has the right idea about what to look out for next. […]
Pingback by Niall Ferguson’s Keynes Was Childless, Gay, So Don’t Worry About The Long … – Forbes | TopHeadlinesNews.com — May 6, 2013 @ 6:59 pm
I would argue that homosexuality is a red herring causing needless offense, and that childlessness was the relevant factor. Skidelsky, in Volume 1 of his biography of Keynes, devotes an astonishing and annoying amount of ink to Keynes’s homosexual exploits at Cambridge, apparently not that uncommon at the time. Yet in Volume 2, he points out that upon marrying Lydia Lopokova, ‘the gate closed on Maynard’s past, never to be opened again.” Yet the General Theory had yet to be written and Keynes’s attitudes did not change.
Further, it seems that, among our own contemporaries, the childless among us seem more comfortable with the levels of debt being run up and are more likely to favor stimulus than austerity. I admit this does not explain the current president, but theories are better at explaining tendencies than predicting individual behaviour.
Professor Ferguson is on to something, but his aim might be a bit off.
Comment by DrD — May 6, 2013 @ 7:54 pm
In general, speculating on the motives of people in their policy descriptions almost never ends well. First, absent actual quotes from people, it is almost impossible to prove. Second, it is very easy to get wrong. Third, it tends to anger people. If you get the motives wrong, the person thinks you are lying about them. If you get the motive right, but its an unflattering one, the person is upset that it makes them look bad and denies it anyway. Another case is that even if in this specific case you are right, it may not be right for other people in the same category. If Keynes doesn’t care about the future because he’s gay and has no children, it does not mean everyone who is gay doesn’t care about the future. And that’s exactly what you have here – even if Ferguson is correct about Keynes, the issue is now political (in a very different sense than policy) and people will bring up other cases that has nothing to do with the facts of Keynes.
Far better just to stick to the facts and evaluate policies on their results, and not waste time on speculation of motives. At least in an academic setting. If you are using it for propaganda purposes and don’t care about the blowback, then whatever.
Comment by Chris — May 7, 2013 @ 6:10 pm
To all: very thoughtful comments, for which I am very appreciative. I agree that the psychological (or psychosexual) roots of Keynes’s economics don’t really matter: what matters is whether his economics are right. Intellectual biography is interesting, on its own terms, but is of limited relevance for contemporary policy debates. Although I think that the reaction to Ferguson is overdone-and yes, hysterical and driven by a political (and politically correct) agenda-I think that Ferguson did a disservice by bringing to the fore a highly charged but ultimately irrelevant issue. I am also persuaded by Tim Worstall’s Forbes piece that Ferguson’s argument-and Schumpeter’s-is questionable.
There really is an issue about the extent that Keynes would be a Keynesian today, at least in the Krugman malignant midget mode. This was a man that had said, when presented with the plan for rationing in Great Britain “well that’s one way to guarantee there will be nothing in the shops.” This was a man firmly based in the concepts of supply and demand, a strong sense of how the world really worked and not at all starry eyed about the future.
This brings up the whole issue of contextualization: most particularly the issue of long term ism if you would, versus short term ism. Consider the dominant “Progressive” ideology of Keynes’ late youth to old age, Futurism and its two little bastard offshoots: Bolshevism and Fascism. If Long term ism justifies the mass murder of Racial or class enemies, while the short termers argue that the way to maximize happiness for people is NOT to put them in death camps, count me as a short termer.
Keynes lived in an age where there was a lot of millennialism, and rightly hated it.
Given the above, the issue of homosexuality becomes completely idiotic. First it assumes that all “gays” have no care for the future given their biological tendency – hardly proven. Secondly that Keynes was Gay, given the modern construct of that word. Intellectual late Victorians and Edwardians did not draw such hard and fast lines as we do today. Sexuality and friendship or love was not one or the other, both could be accommodated in one person. Finally it infantilizes the whole issue: what are we talking about when we say short or long, what are the attitudes towards governance and the kind of political gangsterism we have today. I cannot imagine that anyone as in touch as Keynes (generally speculators pay attention, or are quickly destroyed) would back what is done in his name, as the true agenda of the people behind the Krugmans of this world is power, not charity, no matter what they tell themselves.
Comment by sotos — May 8, 2013 @ 4:42 pm
[…] . Nevertheless, I would agree that but in the long term we’re all dead is a useful counterblast to that view. If you believe, as Keynes did (and as Krugman et al do today) that there are actions we can take that will make things better for people right now, today, then it’s a very good way of dismissing those who insist that it’ll all be fine in a decade or two so why bother? There’s nothing quite as petty as academia of course and my supposition, based on that admittedly iconoclastic reading of Keynes’ “long term” comment, is that it was a dig at Schumpeter (the leading Austrian economist) and one that Schumpeter couldn’t resist having a dig at in return in his academic obituary of Keynes (most of which is almost excessively laudatory I should point out). I think Craig Pirrong has the right idea about what to look out for next. […]
Pingback by Niall Ferguson’s Keynes Was Childless, Gay, So Don’t Worry About The Long … – Forbes | Net News Online — May 9, 2013 @ 1:23 am
[…] Nevertheless, I would agree that but in the long term we’re all dead is a useful counterblast to that view. If you believe, as Keynes did (and as Krugman et al do today) that there are actions we can take that will make things better for people right now, today, then it’s a very good way of dismissing those who insist that it’ll all be fine in a decade or two so why bother? There’s nothing quite as petty as academia of course and my supposition, based on that admittedly iconoclastic reading of Keynes’ “long term” comment, is that it was a dig at Schumpeter (the leading Austrian economist) and one that Schumpeter couldn’t resist having a dig at in return in his academic obituary of Keynes (most of which is almost excessively laudatory I should point out). I think Craig Pirrong has the right idea about what to look out for next. […]
Pingback by Niall Ferguson’s Keynes Was Childless, Gay, So Don’t Worry About The Long … – Forbes | latesthourlynews.com — May 17, 2013 @ 11:23 pm
[…] Nevertheless, I would agree that but in the long term we’re all dead is a useful counterblast to that view. If you believe, as Keynes did (and as Krugman et al do today) that there are actions we can take that will make things better for people right now, today, then it’s a very good way of dismissing those who insist that it’ll all be fine in a decade or two so why bother? There’s nothing quite as petty as academia of course and my supposition, based on that admittedly iconoclastic reading of Keynes’ “long term” comment, is that it was a dig at Schumpeter (the leading Austrian economist) and one that Schumpeter couldn’t resist having a dig at in return in his academic obituary of Keynes (most of which is almost excessively laudatory I should point out). I think Craig Pirrong has the right idea about what to look out for next. […]
Pingback by Niall Ferguson’s Keynes Was Childless, Gay, So Don’t Worry About The Long … – Forbes | MONEY Chit Chat — June 3, 2013 @ 7:39 am