How difficult it is to be right. John Maynard Keynes is “an entertaining economist whose bright but shallow dissertations on finance and political economy, when not taken seriously, always provide a source of innocent merriment to his readers.”

The remark above was published in 1933 by David Lloyd George, British prime minister during World War I, who, Keynes strenuously argued, failed the nation by demanding inhumanly harsh treatment of the defeated enemy after the conflict. Keynes supported Lloyd George’s later attempts to salvage the Liberal Party, but this apparently did not win him sufficient respect from the fading lion.

In fact, Lloyd George’s comment reflected the view held by much of the British establishment. Keynes was unorthodox and had been a thorn in the side of the powers that prevailed in England ever since 1919, when he railed against Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, and Woodrow Wilson. He continued to challenge the conventional wisdom again and again in the 1920s, remained an academic gadfly even when he had become a fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, and argued vehemently that government must do more for the unemployed, rid itself of its attachment to gold, and invest aggressively in public works.

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