The Economic Consequences of the Peace
John Maynard Keynes · 1919
4.8 · 5 ratings
About the book
Keynes walks out of Versailles and writes the most consequential resignation letter in economics: the treaty's arithmetic cannot work, and Europe will pay for pretending it can. The portraits of Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George alone would have made it immortal.
Try the short course
Part 1 · The fragile miracle of 1914 Europe. The first six slides, free.
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Keynes opens with a line about human nature before he says a word about money: the power to become habituated is one of our strongest traits. Whatever we grow up inside starts to feel like the way the world simply is.
In 1919 that habit was dangerous. England had come out of the war feeling, if anything, richer. People who had watched the state spend hundreds of millions without visible pain were planning to pick up where 1914 left off, only with more comfort: the rich to spend more and save less, the poor to spend more and work less.
Keynes had just spent six months in Paris, where reports of hunger and collapse from Central Europe arrived almost hourly. From there, London's calm looked like sleepwalking. The arrangement Europe had lived by for fifty years was unusual, unstable and temporary, and almost nobody could see it.
Inside the course
12 parts- Europe before the war: the fragile miracleFree above
- The conference, and the men in the room
- Wilson: the idealist out-played
- Clemenceau, and the Carthaginian peace
Questions
Is The Economic Consequences of the Peace free to read in Astra Trainer?
Yes. The full book opens free in the app’s reader, in English, German, French, Portuguese, and Russian.
What is the short course?
12 short parts that walk through the book’s key ideas in slides, each with a quick quiz. The first six slides are free to try on this page.
Where do I get the app?
Astra Trainer is free on the App Store and Google Play. The Economic Consequences of the Peace is waiting in the app’s library.
