Niall Ferguson’s Real Mistake - John Maynard Keynes was a childless, “effete” homosexual

He shouldn't have called the queen “effete.” m/r

Niall Ferguson’s Real Mistake | National Review Online

MAY 8, 2013 12:00 AM

Ideas are not inextricably bound to the lifestyles of their authors. 

By Jonah Goldberg

At an investment conference last week, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson created a huge mess for himself. He glibly speculated that maybe because economist John Maynard Keynes was a childless, “effete” homosexual, he embraced a doctrine that favored immediate economic gratification. Keynes’s bon mot “in the long run, we are all dead” takes on new meaning when you realize he didn’t have kids to worry about.

Following the usual script, but at a much faster clip, an uproar ensued on Twitter and on various blogs. Ferguson quickly offered an apology that rivaled John Cleese’s in A Fish Called Wanda in its abjectness. It was all over before the mob could get their pots of oil to full boil.

Part of Ferguson’s bad luck was to recycle an ancient jibe that many people were too ignorant to know was old hat. Polite people didn’t refer to homosexuality much in public until relatively recently, so the barbs were usually aimed at Keynes’s childlessness. For instance, legendary economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote that Keynes “was childless and his philosophy of life was essentially a short-run philosophy.”

This claim didn’t solely come from gay-bashers and right-wingers. For instance, William Greider, a left-wing writer, argues in Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the County that Keynes’s homosexuality contributed to his “defiance of social convention” and served as backdrop for his “rebellion against economic orthodoxy.”

-go to link-