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Keynes Was Gay -- Not That There's Anything Wrong With That
National Review Online ^ | May 4, 2013 | Jonah Goldberg

Posted on 05/05/2013 1:31:51 PM PDT by Yardstick

"There’s a brouhaha a-brewin’ over comments by Niall Ferguson at an investor conference. Ferguson suggested that because John Maynard Keynes was gay, effete, and childless he might have lacked concern for posterity. After all, Keynes famously proclaimed ”in the long run we’re all dead.” In a nigh-upon hysterical and terribly written item, Tom Kostigen of Financial Advisor says Ferguson took “gay-bashing to new heights.” He adds, “Apparently, in Ferguson’s world, if you are gay or childless, you cannot care about future generations nor society.” 

Now, I don’t know exactly what Ferguson said, and I don’t trust Kostigen’s version of events either. There are few full quotes and virtually nothing like proper context to anything (for instance, he seems to think “effete” and “gay” are synonyms). But Ferguson has offered an abject and total apology, which I take to be sincere.

Still, I am a little surprised that so many people have never heard this idea before or that the mere mention of it is now a potential career killer (Felix Salmon of Reuters tweeted in response to Ferguson’s apology, ”It’s conceivable that Niall Ferguson managed to rescue his career with this” (emphasis mine).  

I don’t endorse the theory and completely understand why it offends people. But it’s hardly as if it’s unheard-of in academia to speculate that one’s sexual orientation (or race, or gender, etc.) can influence a person’s views on public policy. Is it really nuts now to think that having kids changes a person’s time horizons? 

More relevant, this theory about Keynes is hardly new. Joseph Schumpeter, I thought famously, suggested that Keynes’s childlessness was a key issue. In his obituary of Keynes, Schumpeter wrote: “He was childless and his philosophy of life was essentially a short-run philosophy.”

Even a cursory look-see in Google Books or LexisNexis shows it’s been around for a long time. Here, via Nexis, is a passage from a 1986 Harvard Business Review article by George Sim Johnston, reviewing a book by Henry Kaufman:

As I say, Dr. Kaufman counsels bond investors to forget the past. Early in the book, however, he tells us that his most strongly held views, particularly with regard to inflation, probably derive from his past, which began in the Weimar Republic. He was born just after the hyperinflation and was weaned on family stories about the overnight disappearance of life savings. Ever since, he has been wary of the state’s ability to print money.

It would be useful if more economists prefaced their works with such biographical material. As William James pointed out, analytical thinking always begins with some personal bias; scratch a mathematical model and you’ll find that its creator prefers blueberry jam to marmalade. John Maynard Keynes would have done a great service if he had begun The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money with the disclosure that he was a Bloomsbury aesthete and a practicing homosexual. He could have explained how he and friends did not believe in self-denial or consider that they had any obligation to posterity. (An historian has pointed out that Keynes’s famous remark, “In the long run we are all dead,” is easy to make if you have no children and don’t want any.) Perhaps as a result we might have lower federal deficits.

Here’s William Grieder suggesting that Keynes’s homosexuality put him at odds with “social convention” and arguing that Keynes’s economic doctrines stemmed in small part from his rejection of the Protestant ethic. 

William Rees Mogg, the former editor of the Times of London went so far as to say that Keynes’s rejection of morality caused him to reject the gold standard. You can read about that in this interesting essay by Keynes’ biographer Robert Sidelsky. Sidelsky rejects the theory, but hardly out of hand. Perhaps because Keynes’ himself described the Bloomsbury mindset as a rejection of all standards:

We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists. The consequences of being found out had, of course, to be considered for what they were worth. But we recognised no moral obligation on us, or inner sanction, to conform or to obey. Before heaven we claimed to be our own judge in our own case.

Intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb draws quite a few lessons from that mindset. She writes:

In fact, something of the “soul” of Bloomsbury penetrated even into Keynes’s economic theories. There is a discernible affinity between the Bloomsbury ethos, which put a premium on immediate and present satisfactions, and Keynesian economics, which is based entirely on the short run and precludes any long-term judgments. (Keynes’s famous remark. “In the long run we are all dead,” also has an obvious connection with his homosexuality — what Schumpeter delicately referred to as his “childless vision.”) The same ethos is reflected in the Keynesian doctrine that consumption rather than saving is the source of economic growth — indeed, that thrift is economically and socially harmful. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, written long before The General Theory, Keynes ridiculed the “virtue” of saving. The capitalists, he said, deluded the working classes into thinking that their interests were best served by saving rather than consuming. This delusion was part of the age-old Puritan fallacy.

So Keynes believed that Puritan values inclined people to embrace an economic theory (capitalism), but the Ferguson episode teaches us that it is now beyond outrageous to suggest that Keynes’s rejection of Puritan values inclined him to embrace a slightly different economic theory (Keynesianism)? Got it.

What I find interesting about the Ferguson controversy is how disconnected it is from the past. Even academics I respect reacted to Ferguson’s comments as if they bordered on unimaginable, unheard-of madness. I understand that we live in a moment where any negative comment connected to homosexuality is not only wrong but “gay bashing.” But Ferguson was trafficking in an old theory that was perfectly within the bounds of intellectual discourse not very long ago. Now, because of a combination of indifference to intellectual history and politically correct piety he must don the dunce cap. Good to know. " />


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Government; Philosophy
KEYWORDS: ferguson; gay; gaystapo; homofascists; homosexualagenda; johnmaynardkeynes; keynes; niallferguson; pc; sodomhusseinobama
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Goldberg defends the point about Keynes's gay childlessness, which limited his time horizon to the present.

Followup from Mark Steyn here.

1 posted on 05/05/2013 1:31:51 PM PDT by Yardstick
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To: Yardstick
If these gays would just shut their mouths and go away...no one would say a thing.

We're sick of you soliciting our kids.

2 posted on 05/05/2013 1:34:23 PM PDT by Sacajaweau
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To: Yardstick

Certainly, being childless, can reduce your sense of the future.


3 posted on 05/05/2013 1:35:02 PM PDT by Jonty30 (What Islam and secularism have in common is that they are both death cults)
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To: Yardstick

He was also a pederast. What we today call a pedophile.


4 posted on 05/05/2013 1:36:19 PM PDT by Steely Tom (If the Constitution can be a living document, I guess a corporation can be a person.)
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To: Yardstick

It’s all about his quote, “In the long run we’re all dead.”


5 posted on 05/05/2013 1:40:25 PM PDT by Travis McGee (www.EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com)
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To: Travis McGee

Exactly right. It has a different meaning when you don’t have kids and grandkids etc.


6 posted on 05/05/2013 1:42:00 PM PDT by Yardstick
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To: Yardstick
So Keynes believed that Puritan values inclined people to embrace an economic theory (capitalism), but the Ferguson episode teaches us that it is now beyond outrageous to suggest that Keynes’s rejection of Puritan values inclined him to embrace a slightly different economic theory (Keynesianism)? Got it.

Its silly to maintain that Keynes' values had no effect on his value system. Its just silly to say.

Most of the people defending his value system in fact agree with his value system. Big surprise.

7 posted on 05/05/2013 1:42:59 PM PDT by marron
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To: Yardstick

I don’t give a carp if he was homosexual or not. Millions have suffered because of his wrong-headed theories.


8 posted on 05/05/2013 1:44:08 PM PDT by Cyber Liberty (I am a dissident. Will you join me? My name is John....)
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To: marron

That is Goldberg’s point exactly. He has put his finger on the inconsistency of Keynes’s modern opponents. They want to make it off limits to correlate his values with his value system when it is simply natural — and hugely explanatory — to do so.


9 posted on 05/05/2013 1:47:41 PM PDT by Yardstick
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To: Steely Tom
e was also a pederast. What we today call a pedophile.

Do you mean Kinsey instead of Keynes?

10 posted on 05/05/2013 1:49:19 PM PDT by WXRGina (The Founding Fathers would be shooting by now.)
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To: Yardstick

Is it more revealing that deviant examples of human nature always show up in the left’s political ‘philosophy’, or that so many people fall for it..


11 posted on 05/05/2013 1:50:31 PM PDT by Track9 (hey Kalid.. kalid.. bang you're dead)
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To: marron
Whoops, typo.

Not Keynes's modern opponents but his modern defenders.

12 posted on 05/05/2013 1:55:54 PM PDT by Yardstick
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To: Cyber Liberty

Being homosexual makes people wrong-headed about so much else in their lives? How many other bad decisions have they made?

Who knew?


13 posted on 05/05/2013 1:56:18 PM PDT by alloysteel (Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.)
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To: alloysteel
Being homosexual makes people wrong-headed about so much else in their lives? How many other bad decisions have they made?

I ain't goin' there.

14 posted on 05/05/2013 1:59:19 PM PDT by Cyber Liberty (I am a dissident. Will you join me? My name is John....)
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To: Yardstick

I agree with the above posters. These homosexual apologists want to make criticism of Keynes’s economic theories off limits because he was a homosexual. This is non-syllogistic reasoning - not that there is anything wrong with that.


15 posted on 05/05/2013 2:05:59 PM PDT by quantumman
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To: WXRGina
Do you mean Kinsey instead of Keynes?

John Maynard Keynes was a pedophile. He admits in his own notes to having sex with young teenage boys. Furthermore. he went on holidays with another Bloomsbury homosexual named Lytton Strachey to northern Africa fleshpots *Tangiers, Cairo, etc., where, as he put it in his letters, ‘bed and boy are inexpensive.’

16 posted on 05/05/2013 2:06:09 PM PDT by Old North State
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To: Yardstick

The success of any species depends on the propensity to procreate and in a species as complex as humans a trait to nurture and care for the helpless newborns even if providing for them causes the parent deprivation. According to Darwinian law those with traits they do not lead to successful procreation are gradually eliminated since their consumption of resources inhibits the survival of a species. From an evolutionary perspective not only is homosexuality not normal but left to natural selection does not have much of a future or concern for the future. Homosexuality has far more to do with social imprinting (eg childhood rape, seduction, abnormal family dynamic etc )than any purported genetic cause.


17 posted on 05/05/2013 2:06:55 PM PDT by allendale
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To: Old North State

Ah, okay. It’s not surprising.

I don’t know much about Keynes, and I thought the name was very close to Kinsey, who was also a pervert of the highest order.


18 posted on 05/05/2013 2:09:59 PM PDT by WXRGina (The Founding Fathers would be shooting by now.)
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To: Yardstick
Not That There's Anything Wrong With That

.. other than biological suicide, ya mean ?

Of course, with a cheerleading fellatio corps (enemedia), spineless slugs like the BSA national cretins, the pandemic of PC appeasers, etal, etal faggot recruitment/victimization is likely at an all time high.

19 posted on 05/05/2013 2:10:25 PM PDT by tomkat
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To: Yardstick

“Before heaven we claimed to be our own judge in our own case.”

As good a definition of Evil as exists.


20 posted on 05/05/2013 2:15:08 PM PDT by TalBlack (Evil doesn't have a day job.)
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