Zachary D. CarterZachary D. Carter
Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes Capa dura – 19 maio 2020
Edição Inglês por Zachary Carter (Autor)
4,7 4,7 de 5 estrelas 1.151 avaliações de clientes
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An “outstanding new intellectual biography of John Maynard Keynes [that moves] swiftly along currents of lucidity and wit” (The New York Times), illuminating the world of the influential economist and his transformative ideas
“A timely, lucid and compelling portrait of a man whose enduring relevance is always heightened when crisis strikes.”—The Wall Street Journal
WINNER OF THE HILLMAN PRIZE FOR BOOK JOURNALISM • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD AND THE SABEW BEST IN BUSINESS BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times • The Economist • Bloomberg • Mother Jones
At the dawn of World War I, a young academic named John Maynard Keynes hastily folded his long legs into the sidecar of his brother-in-law’s motorcycle for an odd, frantic journey that would change the course of history. Swept away from his placid home at Cambridge University by the currents of the conflict, Keynes found himself thrust into the halls of European treasuries to arrange emergency loans and packed off to America to negotiate the terms of economic combat. The terror and anxiety unleashed by the war would transform him from a comfortable obscurity into the most influential and controversial intellectual of his day—a man whose ideas still retain the power to shock in our own time.
Keynes was not only an economist but the preeminent anti-authoritarian thinker of the twentieth century, one who devoted his life to the belief that art and ideas could conquer war and deprivation. As a moral philosopher, political theorist, and statesman, Keynes led an extraordinary life that took him from intimate turn-of-the-century parties in London’s riotous Bloomsbury art scene to the fevered negotiations in Paris that shaped the Treaty of Versailles, from stock market crashes on two continents to diplomatic breakthroughs in the mountains of New Hampshire to wartime ballet openings at London’s extravagant Covent Garden.
Along the way, Keynes reinvented Enlightenment liberalism to meet the harrowing crises of the twentieth century. In the United States, his ideas became the foundation of a burgeoning economics profession, but they also became a flash point in the broader political struggle of the Cold War, as Keynesian acolytes faced off against conservatives in an intellectual battle for the future of the country—and the world. Though many Keynesian ideas survived the struggle, much of the project to which he devoted his life was lost.
In this riveting biography, veteran journalist Zachary D. Carter unearths the lost legacy of one of history’s most fascinating minds. The Price of Peace revives a forgotten set of ideas about democracy, money, and the good life with transformative implications for today’s debates over inequality and the power politics that shape the global order.
LONGLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE
- Número de páginas
608 páginas
- Idioma
Inglês
- Editora
Random House USA Inc
- Data da publicação
19 maio 2020
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Sobre o Autor
Zachary D. Carter is a senior reporter at HuffPost, where he covers Congress, the White House, and economic policy. He is a frequent guest on cable news and news radio, and his written work has also appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, and The American Prospect, among other outlets. His story, “Swiped: Banks, Merchants and Why Washington Doesn't Work for You” was included in the Columbia Journalism Review’s compilation Best Business Writing. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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One
After the Gold Rush
John Maynard Keynes was not an athletic man. Though a spirited debater, he had always suffered from fragile health. Overworked by choice and underexercised out of habit, he had acclimated himself to living in the constant shadow of head colds and influenza attacks. He was thirty-one years old on the first Sunday of August 1914 and had lived nearly all of those years at Cambridge, where, like his father before him, he held a minor academic post. His friend and mentor Bertrand Russell was accustomed to seeing the younger man reviewing figures or buried in papers on weekend afternoons. A King’s College man, Keynes might, in moments of extreme restlessness, calm himself with a walk through the Great Court of Russell’s Trinity College, taking in the turreted medieval towers of King’s Gate, the soaring gothic windows of the chapel built during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and the steady waters of the fountain designed when William Shakespeare had composed Hamlet. Keynes was a man who savored tradition and contemplation. He was perfectly suited for a life at the timeworn university.
But there was Keynes, hustling down the weathered flagstones that afternoon, tearing past the lush, closely cropped green lawns. Russell stopped his young friend to ask what was wrong. Keynes, with a brusque flutter of words, told him he needed to get to London. “Why don’t you go by train?” the philosopher asked.
“There isn’t time,” Keynes replied to the baffled Russell and hurried along.
There were more curiosities to come. Keynes left the court and approached a motorcycle belonging to his brother-in-law, Vivian Hill. Keynes—who was nearly six feet seven—folded his long legs into the sidecar, and the two proceeded to putter and jostle their way sixty miles to the capital. Their odd, frantic journey would change the fate of the British Empire.
England was in the fifth day of the most violent financial crisis it had ever experienced—one that threatened to tear its economy apart even as the nation’s leaders wrestled over the most momentous diplomatic question of their generation: whether to enter the war breaking out on the European continent. Though none of the foreign policy experts and financial engineers huddled in London recognized it at the time, the economic system that had fed and fueled Europe for the past half century had just come to a sudden, cataclysmic end.
Since the close of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, the world’s great powers—and many of its minor players—had grown to depend on complex international trade arrangements to provide their citizens with everything from basic foodstuffs to heavy machinery. It was an era of ostentatious prosperity for both the aristocracy and an expanding, increasingly powerful middle class, a period future generations would romanticize with names like “La Belle Époque” and “The Gilded Age.” In England, factory workers spun Egyptian cotton and New Zealand wool into fineries that decorated homes all over the continent. The well-to-do and the up-and-coming adorned themselves with diamonds and ivory from South Africa embedded in settings crafted from gold mined in Australia. In Paris, the Hôtel Ritz served afternoon tea from India, while a new mode of haute cuisine spread through the luxury hotels of Europe, combining ingredients from the New World with what had once been regional specialties of France, Italy, and Germany.
“In this economic Eldorado, in this economic Utopia,” Keynes would later recall, “life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages.”
The cultural explosion was the product of empire. England, Spain, France, Germany, Russia, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Ottoman Empire, and even the adolescent United States all deployed military force to cultivate power over the people and resources of other continents. Keynes was aware of the brutalities that accompanied British imperialism, once earning a rebuke from a top official at the India Office for issuing a report that depicted a “coldblooded” British response to a plague that had “terribly ravaged” India. But Keynes did not consider such events an integral element of the world’s economic structure. They were instead unfortunate impurities, flaws that would eventually be distilled away by the engines of progress. “The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of [the] daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life.”
What fascinated Keynes as a young economist was not the manner in which this new material abundance was extracted by European powers but the “the easy flow of capital and trade” among them. All across the continent new financial contracts had been woven into the patterns of global commerce. Companies were accustomed to borrowing money in one country, selling their products in another, and purchasing insurance in yet another. The proud, beating heart of this order was the City of London, the financial district of the British capital, where fully half of the world’s business affairs were financed. Whatever their nationality, the storied banking dynasties of the age—the transcontinental Rothschilds, the French Lazards, the Schröders of Hamburg and the American House of Morgan—all set up critical operations in London, where more than a billion dollars in foreign bonds were issued every year to private enterprise and sovereign governments alike. This financial power had transformed London into the thickest bustling metropolis on the planet, with a population of more than six million, nearly double that of 1861.
For all its complexity, the system London oversaw had enjoyed a remarkable stability. Trading accounts between nations were balanced, capital flows were steady and predictable, and financial disruptions in the Old World were brief affairs, always quickly corrected. Measured against such fabulous symmetries, most members of the leisure class considered even the underbelly of this system—domestic industrial poverty, a twenty-year agricultural depression in America—to be inconsequential. “The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep,” Keynes wrote. “Most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement.”
The new financial reality had spawned its own political ideology. In 1910, the British journalist Norman Angell published The Great Illusion, a book claiming to demonstrate that the international commercial entanglements of the twentieth century had made war economically irrational. No nation, Angell argued, could profit by subjugating another through military conquest. Even the victors would suffer financial harm, whatever the spoils might be.
Angell was wrong—and, worse, misunderstood. His book sold millions of copies, developing a cult following of influential public officials who came to believe that because war was financially counterproductive, it was now a problem of the past. That was not what Angell himself actually preached; “irrational” did not mean “impossible.” But in an age possessed by an ideal of enlightened, rational government, many political leaders came to believe that the prospect of war was becoming “more difficult and improbable” by the day. It was an early version of the doctrine New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman would eventually formulate in a bestseller of his own a century later, when he declared that “no two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain . . . will ever fight a war.”
But the unthinkable event had in fact arrived. On July 28, 1914, a teenage Yugoslav nationalist murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, during a visit to Sarajevo, and the empire retaliated by declaring war on Serbia. Armies were now mobilizing from France all the way to Russia. As the thicket of political alliances appeared certain to draw empire upon empire into the looming conflict, the seemingly impregnable payment system that had made London the center of the economic universe abruptly collapsed.
Detalhes do produto
- Editora : Random House USA Inc (19 maio 2020)
- Idioma : Inglês
- Capa dura : 608 páginas
- ISBN-10 : 0525509038
- ISBN-13 : 978-0525509035
- Dimensões : 16.05 x 4.22 x 24.18 cm
- Ranking dos mais vendidos: Nº 416.850 em Livros (Conheça o Top 100 na categoria Livros)
- Nº 17.071 em Administração, Negócios e Economia (Livros)
- Avaliações dos clientes:
4,7 4,7 de 5 estrelas 1.151 avaliações de clientes
Sobre o autor
Descubra mais livros do autor, veja autores semelhantes, leia recomendações de livros e muito mais.
Avaliado no Brasil em 14 de outubro de 2020
Livro cuidadosamente elaborado, entremeando detalhes biográficos com análises consistentes. As inflexões da reflexão de Keynes - desde seus primeiros escritos até sua participação em Bretton Woods - são minuciosamente analisadas. O livro percorre não apenas Keynes, mas também o Bloomsbury Group, o ambiente de Cambridge, e as contribuições de Joan Robinson, Kahn e Galbraith, entre outros. As discussões dos capítulos finais sobre a trajetória da economia norte-americana no pós-guerra são igualmente estimulantes. Livro indispensável para aqueles que se debruçam sobre a obra de Keynes. Ao lado das valiosas contribuições de Skidelsky, Dostaler e Belluzzo, o livro de Zachary Carter é uma contribuição duradoura ao resgate e esclarecimento do pensamento desse grande pensador do século XX.
Avaliado na França em 26 de agosto de 2020
This is one of those rarity that would get a 6 stars rating, if possible.
I am not a professional in this subject (neither history nor economics) but I have read several books on the history of economics, economic crashes, exuberances and depressions, economic theories, globalizations and all flavors of liberalisms, but this book will tower as #1 in my section of such books in my library for a long time to come.
First, it is exceptionally clear with a language that even non-specialist (like me) understand from cover to cover.
Second, the biography of the central figure in the book is simply magistral and deeply humane: rarely people are dissected, explained, analyzed, criticized and loved as done for JMK by the author in this book.
Third, the author uses a style that reminds me of another older and beautiful book, A Distant Mirror by B. Tuchman, where the main figure is perfectly inserted in the dramas of his period to create a unique narrative of a human being inserted and explained in his historical milieu, not in an immaterial cloud of philosophical principles and abstract theories or, even worse, boring historical events.
Fourth, despite masqueraded under the excuse of a biography, the book also is actually an excellent review of the political choices of the last century that have shaped our world and have created our present condition. If there is one thing that comes up brilliantly uncovered and explained by the book is that there is no economics without political choices.
I can only most warmly recommend reading attentively this book which has helped me enormously to understand the period I am leaving in and how we got here.
LUIS FUEYO
5,0 de 5 estrelas The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes
Avaliado no México em 26 de setembro de 2020
草枕温泉老人Hotspring
5,0 de 5 estrelas 平易に良く書かれた伝記
Avaliado no Japão em 19 de junho de 2020
LP
5,0 de 5 estrelas Brilliant
Avaliado nos Estados Unidos em 28 de março de 2025
Incredible story about a brilliant and remarkable man and Investor who truly thought outside the box. He was truly a unique individual, who kept his unorthodox lifestyle under the radar. As the architect of monetary policy No economist has had such an impact on fiscal and monetary policy than John Maynard Keynes. I read this book cover to cover and walked away with a much better perspective of who he was, and how he applied his knowledge of economics to the real world.
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