John Maynerd Keynes

Prof DeLong has a jazzy post about Keynes that actually make him sound kind of sexy.

John Maynard Keynes is the man who has the best claim to be the architect of our modern world—whether it is how our central banks think about economic policy, what our governments believe that they must try to do, the institutions through which they work, or the habit of thought that views the economy not as Adam Smith's “system of natural liberty” but as a complicated machine that needs adjustment and governance, all of these trace large parts of their roots to the words and deeds of John Maynard Keynes.
....
Keynes was one of a relatively small number of brilliant students thrust as a leaven into the mass of Britain's upper class at Eton, and thus became part of “an intellectual elite thrust into the heart of a social elite” (HB, page 77). An entire cohort of Britain's upper class thus learned before they were twenty that Keynes could be very smart, very witty, very entertaining—and very helpful if there was a hard problem to be thought through or something to be done.

These are notes for his Political Economy 101 class. I envy his students.