In my time, I’ve read a lot about Keynes and a lot by him too. It started with the [amazon_link id=”B0000CHV15″ target=”_blank” ]Roy Harrod biography[/amazon_link], then the [amazon_link id=”0333903129″ target=”_blank” ]Robert Skidelsky trilogy[/amazon_link] (since updated as a single volume version), and more recently the excellent [amazon_link id=”0674057759″ target=”_blank” ]Capitalist Revolutionary[/amazon_link] by Roger Backhouse and Bradley Bateman. I’ve read at various times [amazon_link id=”9650060251″ target=”_blank” ]The General Theory[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”1441492267″ target=”_blank” ]Essays in Persuasion[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”1447418220″ target=”_blank” ]The Economic Consequences of the Peace[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”0230249582″ target=”_blank” ]Essays in Biography[/amazon_link], and parts of [amazon_link id=”1614270112″ target=”_blank” ]A Treatise on Money[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”0674057759″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes[/amazon_image]

So it’s a pleasant surprise to learn new things about him, and so I am from Benn Steil’s The Battle of Bretton Woods. The story of Keynes sitting in bed in his dressing gown of a morning, dealing with his investments is well known. My admiration has grown on learning now that he also liked to sleep late in the mornings and go to bed early; he referred to this as ‘snuffing the candle at both ends’. How much more refreshing than the cult of only sleeping for a few hours a night. He enjoyed his first job, in the India Office, mainly because of the 11am to 5pm hours and two months of annual holiday.

Steil also cites this comment by Keynes on financiers: “How long will it be found necessary to pay City men so entirely out of proportion to what other servants of society commonly receive for performing social services not less useful or difficult?”

Amen to that.

I’ve started to read properly Benn Steil’s [amazon_link id=”0691149097″ target=”_blank” ]The Battle of Bretton Woods[/amazon_link], which has been sitting tantalisingly on the book pile for a few weeks, and I’d only paged through when laid low by a cold. I like this quote from President Roosevelt, early in the book – it’s his message to the opening of the Bretton Woods conference:

“Economic diseases are highly communicable. It follows, therefore, that the economic health of every country is a proper matter of concern to all its neighbours, near and distant. Only through a dynamic and soundly expanding world economy can the living standards of individual nations be advanced to levels which will permit a full realization of our hopes for the future.”

How apt for our own times, as well as 1944. I spent a couple of days this week at the OECD’s annual forum and was mulling over the OECD’s origins in US Marshall Aid and post-war rebuilding. Just over 50 years old, it is a low-key place but is an important part of the framework of international economic governance, dealing with gritty but important stuff like tax co-ordination and financial compliance. There has also been a lot of wider thought there about what kind of global economy we might be able to build for the future, including engagement with the wider public, with its Better Life work, for example.

However, technocrats can only go so far without political impetus. The major surplus countries of our day, Germany and China, unfortunately show no signs of the vision that might encourage them to acts of global leadership.

[amazon_image id=”0691149097″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Council on Foreign Relations Books (Princeton University Press))[/amazon_image]