EconAir

  A play about John Maynard Keynes recently opened in London. People are paying to see a play about an economist? I hope it’s a comedy. Or at least a musical like  Hamilton .   Keynes was born in England in 1883. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge. His father was a professor at Cambridge. His mother was mayor of Cambridge in 1932-33.   He spent the first 10 years of his professional life analyzing or thinking about the English economy that was at the end of 100 years of England’s political and economic dominance of the global economy (including English colonies) through advanced manufacturing technology, exports, and overseas capital investment. But already, by 1910, Germany and the United States had larger industrial output with better and more innovative technology (new industries). England was falling behind. The United States had higher productivity in key British industries of cotton textiles and coal. The country was living off of the income from past domest...

Kaiser Wilhelm INTRODUCTION Some historians believe that the twentieth century began with World War I.  But how did World War I begin? The horrors of Europe’s twentieth century were born of this catastrophe; it was, as the American historian Fritz Stern put it, "the first calamity of the twentieth century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang." The consequences lasted at least until 1991, the breakup of the Soviet Union, which may mark the end of the twentieth century.  But the immediate cause of the war – instability and wars in the Balkans – reappeared again with the breakup of Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia, which was created after World War I. Rivalry among nations over influence in the Central European "borderlands" continues. Violence in the Middle East is partly a result of the arbitrary national boundaries drawn up by French and British imperialists during World War I. The economic dislocations caused by Wo...