John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes graduated from Cambridge in 1904 with a mathematics degree, then built his career dismantling the orthodoxy that free markets automatically deliver full employment. During the Great Depression he published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in early 1936, insisting that total spending - not wage flexibility - determined employment levels, and that downturns required deliberate fiscal and monetary intervention. By the late 1930s Western governments were adopting his prescriptions; by two decades after his death in 1946, nearly all capitalist states had followed. He helped design the postwar economic order as part of the British delegation, watched his influence ebb during the stagflation of the 1970s under monetarist attack, then saw it roar back in 2008 when his playbook underwrote the crisis response from Washington to London. Time called his willingness to spend money governments didn't have the idea that may have saved capitalism.