Keynes In Cambridge

Extract

I Was asked to write a paper about “Keynes in Cambridge,” to supplement two other papers about his work as a public servant and as an economist. I am glad to do this, but let me explain at the beginning the limits of my qualifications. I worked under him as an undergraduate for two years, 1928 to 1930, and I saw something of him on three later visits to Cambridge in 1931,1934, and 1936. I saw him again in the United States several times during the war when he was representing the Government of the United Kingdom in financial discussions. From all this you will gather that I cannot claim for a moment to have been an intimate friend. Nevertheless I understand I am supposed to write in a rather more personal vein than those who are reading the other papers.

Let me begin by talking, about Keynes as a teacher. During the years in which I happened to work under him, 1928 to 1930, his thinking on monetary theory was changing. These were the transition years between his traditional quantity-theory-of-money approach, in his Tract on Monetary Reform published in 1923, and his novel savings-and-investment approach, in his Treatise on Money published in 1930. He put forward his new ideas in a series of eight lectures—one a week for one term. Obviously the lectures had to be highly condensed and, despite the pleasantness and clearness with which they were delivered, I doubt that many undergraduates got very much out of them. However, they were not primarily intended for undergraduates; Keynes was trying out his new ideas on anyone who cared to listen, and there was always a group of his fellow dons at his lectures, as well as some graduate students who were still rather rare in Cambridge.