Family Tree Tuesday – John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes was a British economist and is widely considered to be one of the founders of modern macroeconomics and the most influential economist of the 20th century. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics. According to Keynesian economics, state intervention was necessary to moderate “boom and bust” cycles of economic activity. Criticisms of Keynes’s ideas had begun to gain significant acceptance by the early 1970s as they were able to make a credible case that Keynesian models no longer reflected economic reality. In 2007, the global financial crisis caused a resurgence in Keynesian thought.

John Maynard Keynes was born on June 5, 1883 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England to John Neville Keynes and Florence Ada Keynes. John Neville Keynes was an economist and a lecturer in moral sciences at the University of Cambridge. Florence was a British author, social reformer and became Mayor of Cambridge in 1932 at the age of 70. Her great-uncle was John Langdon Down who was a British physician best known for his description of a relatively common genetic disorder that is now called Down syndrome.

John Langdon Down

Keynes’ siblings were Margaret Neville Keynes and Sir Geoffrey Keynes. Margaret married English physiologist Archibald Hill, he was one of the founders of the diverse disciplines of biophysics and operations research. Hill shared the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine for his elucidation of the production of heat and mechanical work in muscles. Margaret and Archibald’s children were economist Polly Hill, physiologist David Keynes Hill, oceanographer Maurice Hill and child psychiatrist Janet Hill who married immunologist John Herbert Humphrey.

Sir Geoffrey Keynes was an English biographer, surgeon, physician and scholar. He married Margaret Darwin, the daughter of Sir George Howard Darwin and granddaughter of Charles Darwin. They had four sons – British physiologist Richard Darwin Keynes, explorer, writer and filmmaker Quentin George Keynes, British doctor and author William Milo Keynes and chairman of the Charles Darwin Trust Stephen John Keynes.

Did you know that John Maynard Keynes’s parents outlived him? His father John Neville Keynes outlived him by three years and his mother Florence Ada Keynes by twelve years.

Check out John Maynard Keynes’s family tree and see how you may be related!