JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES: Economics with a Nervous System

John Maynard Keynes is usually introduced as the economist who saved capitalism from itself. That is true, as far as it goes. But it is not how he thought of himself, and it is not how he lived.

Keynes moved through the world less like a technocrat than like a man attentive to atmospheres—rooms, moods, confidences, collapses. His economics emerged not from abstraction, but from observation: how people actually behave when frightened, hopeful, reckless, bored. He did not believe that markets were rational systems tending naturally toward equilibrium. He believed they were made of people, and that people were volatile, suggestible, contradictory, and emotional.