Quotes from Robert Skidelsky

Economics, he told Roy Harrod in 1938, is 'a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world… Good economists are scarce because the gift of using "vigilant observation" to choose good models… appears to be a very rare one'.

His favoured objects of contemplation were economic facts, usually in statistical form. He used to say that his best ideas came to him from 'messing about with figures and seeing what they must mean'. Yet he was famously sceptical about econometrics – the use of statistical methods for forecasting purposes. He championed the cause of better statistics, not to provide material for the regression coefficient, but for the intuition of the economist to play on.

The academic economist never really knows what makes a businessman tick, why he wants sometimes to gamble on an investment project and why he sometimes prefers liquidity and cash. Maynard understood because he was a gambler himself and felt the gambling or liquidity instincts of the business man. He once said to me, 'Remember, Nicholas, that business life is always a bet.

Shortly before his death, he gave a toast to economics and economists -'trustees, not of civilisation, but of the possibilities of civilisation'. Only someone with a fine sense of language, and an Edwardian sense of life's purpose, would have chosen exactly those words.

The word 'unemployment' first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1888 – a sign of things to come

Contemporaries knew him as the man with the bulging brief-case, hurrying from one place, one meeting, to another. His life was embedded in a dense mass of miscellaneous activities which both fertilized and distracted him from his writing. His failure to produce a major work of theory till 1930, when he was almost 50, was the price he paid.

Beauty for Keynes and his friends meant chiefly Post-Impressionist painting, Russian ballet, and the new styles of decorative art influenced by both. For those with money, taste, and domestic servants (and one did not have to have much money to afford servants), London just before the First World War was an exciting place.

Economics could not be an exact science, because the number of variables was too great, and stability of variables over time could not be guaranteed. As he was to put it later, it is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

under modern conditions of trade-union-led wage bargaining, a reduction in the quantity of money led directly to a reduction in the quantity of employment.

In September 1917, Keynes went to Washington for the first of his loan negotiations, and did not like the experience. 'The only really sympathetic and original thing in America is the niggers, who are charming,' he wrote to Duncan Grant.

Keynes's economics – unlike Keynesian economics – was philosophically driven. It was informed by his vision of the 'good life'; it was permeated by his theory of probability. These philosophical foundations were laid early in his life. Philosophy came before economics; and the philosophy of ends came before the philosophy of means.

The revolutionary thought, brought out more clearly in The General Theory, was that there was no automatic mechanism in a modern economic system to keep intended saving in equilibrium with intended investment.

Two books of essays also appeared – Essays in Persuasion (1931) and Essays in Biography (1933). The first collected what Keynes, in his introduction, called 'the croakings of twelve years – the croakings of a Cassandra who could never influence the course of events in time'. A notable feature of the second is Keynes's use of short lives of men of science to ponder and delineate the character of scientific genius.

It follows straightforwardly from Moore that goodness is increased, ceteris paribus, by an increase in the amount of beauty. Keynes acted on this belief both as a philanthropist, builder of the Cambridge Arts theatre, and by accepting the job of first chairman of the Arts Council.

The cancellation of inter-Ally war debts was designed to de-couple American finance from Europe. Keynes supported American loans to get European industry restarted, pay for essential food imports, and stabilize currencies. But he was adamantly opposed to Europeans borrowing from the United States to service deadweight debt. His book became an international best-seller, had a profound effect on post-war thinking, and made Keynes world-famous.

Another student, Lorie Tarshis, wrote: 'And finally what Keynes supplied was hope: hope that prosperity could be restored and maintained without the support of prison camps, executions and bestial interrogations….

when the seats of power and authority have been attained there should be no more poetic licence'.

These are reflected in two articles he wrote in 1933 in praise of 'National Self-Sufficieny', which combined a moral attack on the international division of labour with the argument that 'most modern mass-production processes can be performed in most countries and climates with almost equal efficiency'.

In deciding what is rational to do, we need to take into account two further considerations independent of probability, which Keynes called 'the weight of argument' and 'moral risk'.

The principle of moral risk suggests that it is more rational to aim for a smaller good which seems more probable of attainment than to aim for a larger one which seems less, when the two courses of action have equal probable goodness. Other things being equal, 'a high weight and the absence of risk increase pro tanto the desirability of the action to which they refer'.

His life spanned not just the collapse of British power, but the growing enfeeblement of the British economy. It spanned the passage from certainty to uncertainty, from the perfumed garden of his youth to the jungle of his mature years, where monsters prowled.

It was the income-determination model, based on the multiplier, together with the consequent development of national income statistics, which made Keynesian economics acceptable to policy-makers, since it offered them a seemingly secure method of forecasting and controlling the movement of such 'real' variables as investment, consumption, and employment.

These discussions are not just of historic interest. Keynes was the first economist to put uncertainty at the heart of the economic problem, and thus raise the issue of the scope and meaning of rationality in economics. Is rationality possible in an uncertain world, and how is it to be specified?

It is fatal for a capitalist government to have principles. It must be opportunistic in the best sense of the word, living by accommodation and good sense. If a monarchical, plutocratic or other analogous form of government has principles, it will fall.