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Sunday 5 July 2009

I will always defend a big spender like J.M. Keynes

Nancy Dell’Olio makes an impassioned case for Keynesian economics as the necessary remedy for the global crisis. It is to the Cambridge economist that we should turn once more

I am an optimist. One of the reasons why I have always been a fan of the brilliant British economist John Maynard Keynes is that he too was an unashamed optimist who believed in the power of money for making things better. Unemployment, recession, deflation — if we were to believe all we see and read from the courts of the media kings, we might all be depressed into thinking there is no way out.

Born in Cambridge in the year that Karl Marx died, Keynes was a much more intriguing figure than his grey cadre of contemporaries. He brought flair and style to a dull establishment. A friend of Virginia Woolf and married to a ballerina (ballet is my passion), he became the darling of the Bloomsbury Group. Anyone who could say that the ‘economic problem is not — if we look into the future — the permanent problem of the human race’ is a human being with foresight. That was like saying you can make poverty history in the 1930s. For me, as an Italian-American law student at NYU, fascinated by the English intellectual order, he was an inspiration. Imagine, then, my chagrin when I found myself sitting by placement next to an eminent British historian (of that same Cambridge ilk) who had the killjoy temerity to criticise my hero and throw gloom over my social enjoyment of a fine dinner.

I was at a table hosted by Condé Nast chief Nicholas Coleridge. The conversation started off light and bubbly, like champagne, and sparkled with early-evening pleasantries. Soon, however, the talk turned to swopping bleak mid-winter opinions on the world economic crisis, and the good-humoured banter began to stall. Keen to avoid anything too negative with my food, I hoped to raise spirits by turning to the optimistic remedy proposed by Keynes during the dark years of the 1930s. ‘I have always loved a big spender,’ I said, a little flippantly. ‘The worst thing you can do is keep your money in the bank, so you might as well go out and spend it while you have it and help save the European economy.’

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