Born On This Day- June 5th... John Maynard Keynes

"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone." 
John Maynard Keynes

I have never had much interest in economics. Those who know me, would not be surprised. I think possibly I could choose to comprehend global economics, political economics, recessions, depressions, macroeconomics, business cycles, social liberalism, & Keynesian thought. I just go with my instincts, which are almost never wrong.

What I do knowing about a certain economist, one of the most important figures of the 20th century;  is that John Maynard Keynes kept a written record of all his sexual encounters, even the assignations where he was alone, from his days at Cambridge until his death. I don’t know why I admire that idea. Steve's Sex Diary might generate some publishing interests & possibly a film with James Franco, but who can remember the details?

Keynes moved in the Bloomsbury Group, of which I have done plenty of posts about. A member of that literary & artist circle was his longtime lover artist- Duncan Grant. The pair remained friends long after the romance was over.  For much of their time together Grant was also involved with Leonard Strachey.

Grant & Keynes

Grant & Strachey set up households with women, while they both continued to have sex with men. Keynes soon followed, marrying Lydia Lopokpva, a ballet start in Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. They seem to have had satisfying partnership.

On the good side: Keynes spent his life working energetically for the benefit of mankind & he was considered to a fine & generous friend. On the bad side: he was a a racist & supporter of Eugenic a movement that supported enforced "racial hygiene", human experimentation, & the extermination of "undesired" population groups.

Keynes died of a heart attack at age 62, in 1948, at his farm in England. Both of his parents: John Neville Keynes, also an economist & Florence Ada Keynes, one of the first women to graduate from Cambridge & later the mayor of that city outlived him. Lydia Lopokpva lived into the early 1980s.