The Price of Peace, Zachary D. Carter’s outstanding new intellectual biography of John Maynard Keynes, offers a resonant guide to our current moment ... It’s rare for a 600-page economic history to move swiftly along currents of lucidity and wit, and this happens to be one of them ... Carter begins with a love story, and ends with an elegant explanation of a credit default swap; even readers without a background in high finance will learn how to appreciate the drama of both ... Carter’s explications of macroeconomic theory are so seamlessly woven into his narrative that they’re almost imperceptible; you only notice how substantive they are once you get to his chapter on Keynes’s notoriously dense 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, and realize that you’re riveted by a passage on fluctuations in liquidity preference because you somehow know exactly what it is that Carter is talking about ... As this brilliantly incisive book shows, being fair and judicious doesn’t necessarily mean trying to reconcile all sides.
Carter has crafted a timely, lucid and compelling portrait of a man whose enduring relevance is always heightened when crisis strikes. If there is a conspicuous blemish in the book, it is the polemical turn of its last third, which goes well beyond the life of his subject. Still, readers of all political persuasions will, in the biographical material at least, find plenty of insight for our time ... wholly apart from his auspicious timing, Mr. Carter has, with this fresh reappraisal, made an outstanding authorial debut. The financial and economic questions with which Keynes wrestled, both as scholar and adviser, were complex, and it is tempting for an author writing for a wide audience to gloss superficially over the more difficult ones. But whether the subject is war reparations or interest-rate policy, Mr. Carter leaves no reader behind, and he writes with wit and clarity ... Keynes and Keynesianism disappear for long stretches of text, as the discussion devolves into an ever-angrier assault on “neoliberal” trade and market-liberalization policies, which Mr. Carter blames for growing inequality ... Mr. Carter is also too dismissive of contributions to economic policy thinking from the center and the right, particularly from Nobel Prize winners Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman—both of whom he paints, in his more charitable moments, as tools of reactionary and moneyed interests ... In the end, readers who admire the anti-'market fundamentalism' of Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, whom Mr. Carter quotes approvingly, will delight in this book’s extended epilogue; those who don’t, won’t. In any case, Mr. Carter might have been wiser to write two books, letting his fine and eloquent analysis of Keynes’s life and thought stand alone as the best single-volume biography of this intellectual giant.
... a spectacular new biography that paints a rich and textured portrait of the great economist and locates his ideas within the broad sweep of economic and intellectual history ... Although Carter is known for his reporting on economic policy for HuffPost, he has found an even higher calling as a writer who can explain economic concepts with such clarity and simplicity that we digest them with the same ease and satisfaction as a plump oyster sliding down our gullet. With his first book, Carter establishes himself as the rare writer who can weave compelling narrative, insightful analysis and explication of complex phenomena in prose that is accessible, elegant, almost lyrical at times. The Price of Peace should be required reading for every economics major and anyone who struggles to understand the interplay of money, markets and economic policy ... If I have any quibble with The Price of Peace, it is with Carter’s critique of “neoliberal” economists and policymakers who strayed from the true Keynesian path over the past 40 years by embracing globalization, deregulation and fiscal austerity.
... manages to convey the fun of reading Keynes, even as it obeys the conventions of popular narrative history with its breezy manner and its insistence on pausing for brief character portraits. But it does suffer somewhat from an adulatory tone toward its subject (admittedly, this might be a hazard of writing about Keynes; once he leaves the scene, the second half of the book is much less fun) ... A more skeptical attitude might have permitted Carter to ask whether Keynes himself bears some responsibility for the way that his ideas never quite fulfilled their promise ... Carter’s book does help us to understand why so many American businesspeople reacted with antipathy toward an economic program that many credited with rescuing capitalism.
... [a] solid, sombre intellectual biography ... I’m dubious about Carter’s claim that Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace deserves to be ranked with Strachey’s Eminent Victorians and Eliot’s The Waste Land as a modernist masterpiece; he does a better job of presenting the economist as an artist manqué ... In Carter’s persuasive account, the slippery triangulations of Clinton and Blair are the final betrayal of Keynes: neoliberalism set markets free, unleashed speculators, and opened the way to a globalisation that treated people as 'disembodied profit maximisers' and crammed them into Hillary Clinton’s 'basket of deplorables.'
...ingenious ... an entertaining summary of 20th-century economic history that will appeal to the general reader ... The key to Keynes, Mr Carter shows, is to place him in his time and class—a well-heeled British intellectual who moved effortlessly between the worlds of academia, government and the arts ... The world will be debating, and learning from, the work of Keynes for many decades to come.
In this illuminating and well-researched book, Carter not only explains Keynesian economics, but also provides a comprehensive portrait of British economist John Maynard Keynes ... Carter explains how Keynes advocated for better strategies to achieve peace and prosperity. He also enhances the work by providing one the best in-depth discussions of the gold standard ... Academic readers who want more biographical information about Keynes will be captivated by this depiction of his life and thinking.
In this sweeping intellectual biography, Carter traces Keynes’ career from his first forays into public policy during WWI, through the bumpy 1920s, and the Great Depression, to its end in the behind-the-scenes negotiations of WWII. He vividly describes Keynes’ world, which encompassed both European realpolitik and the Bloomsbury Group, and illustrates how his academic, cultural, and political activities influenced his ideas ... Carter’s timely study is highly recommended.
... compassionate and richly detailed ... Carter makes complex economic concepts accessible, and eloquently untangles Keynes’s many personal and professional contradictions. This is an essential portrait of the economist and the man.
