A Treatise On Probability By John Maynard Keynes Pdf

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John Maynard KEYNES

b. 5 June 1883 - d. 21 April 1946

Summary. Keynes was a philosopher-economist whose abidinginterest in logical argument, probability and statistics, and his fertilityand originality in economic theory and policy, made him one of the most influential figures of the 20th century.

Born in Cambridge, England, to a middle class family, Keynes was educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge. He later achieved greatest fame as an economist, but he never took an economics degree. Although his undergraduate studies were in mathematics, his intellectual passion at that time was philosophy, the primary influence here being G.E. Moore, the noted ethical philosopher. Grappling with Moore's arguments about morality, in fact,led Keynes to formulate the germ of his ideas on probability in 1904. It was only after completing his mathematics degree that he began the concentrated study of economics, his main mentor being Alfred Marshall. During his first period of employment in the British Civil Service at the India Office where he worked on economics and statistics, he submitted a fellowship dissertation on `The Principles of Probability'. A revised version in 1908 won him a fellowship at King's College in 1909. Eventually published in 1921 as a Treatise on Probability, it had a significant impact on the philosophy of probability at the time, but its influence has since waned considerably. Nevertheless it remains central to understanding his thinking on logic, probability, rationality, and statistical inference. In 1908, while re-working his dissertation, he even envisaged his future field of academic expertise to be Logic and Statistical Theory. Marshall had other ideas, however, and offered an Economics lectureship which Keynes accepted because it provided a means of returning to Cambridge from London. During World War I, he worked in the British Treasury and was a delegate to the Versailles Conference in 1919. Finding the reparations conditions imposed on Germany economically and morally outrageous, he resigned and wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, the first book that made him world-famous.

For the rest of his life Keynes was mainly engaged with economics, though other interests also absorbed his attention such as politics and the arts. In economics, where his output was enormous and influential, he focused on theoretical and practical issues as well as individual countries and the world economy. Inflation and exchange rate instability were early concerns in the 1920s, followed by unemployment during the 1930s Great Depression, and inflation again during the 1940s war years. His magnum opus in economics was The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money of 1936, a pioneering work that established modern macroeconomics, created Keynesian economics as a serious alternative to Neoclassical economics, and stimulated the development of National Accounting statistics. During World War II, he again assisted the British war effort in the Treasury. In his final years, he played a key role in the negotiations that shaped the institutions which dominated the post-war international economy - the Bretton Woods system, the IMF, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. In 1925 he married the Russian ballerina, Lydia Lopokova, but there were no children. He died of a heart attack in 1946, brought on by over-work.

It was as a young man that Keynes did the bulk of his work on probability and statistics.The years 1908-12 saw nine contributions to the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (JRSS) and several on statistical subjects to the Economic Journal (EJ). These were concerned with index numbers, a critique of Elderton and Pearson (q.v.) (see below), reviews of seven European works on probability and statistics (by Borel (q.v.), Czuber, Poincaré, Bachelier (q.v.), Carvello, Markov (q.v.) and Horrowicz), and the theory of averages where Keynes argued that popular preference for the arithmetic mean was misplaced since it did not always provide the most probable value. In 1909 he wrote a long, prize-winning essay on Index Numbers.

In the philosophy of probability, Keynes is best known as a founder of the logical theory of probability, a rival to the relative frequency and subjective theories. His ideas are set out in his philosophical magnum opus, the Treatise on Probability. This is not a mathematical work on the probability calculus, but a philosophical work concerned with logic and rationality. Keynes argued that probability is the general logic of rational but non-conclusive argument, within which deductive logic is the special case of complete certainty or unit probabilities. This view conceives of probability as a logical relation between a conclusion, $a$, and premisses or data, $h$, which give partial support to $a$. Keynes's symbol for probability is $a/h$, which emphasises the>[1] Keynes, J.M. (1971-89). The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, 30 Vols, Macmillan. Of particular interest in the present context are the following: (i) Vol. VIII: Treatise on Probability. (ii) Vol. XI: the Index Number essay, his early statistical contributions to the JRSS and EJ, and book reviews. (iii) Vol. X: the JRSS paper on W.S. Jevons, and obituaries of Edgeworth, Lexis, Tschuprow (Chuprov), Sanger, Broomhall and Ramsey. (iv) Vol. XIV: the Tinbergen episode (excluding Keynes's final letters, on which see O'Donnell 1997).[2] Moggridge, D.E. (1992). Maynard Keynes, An Economist's Biography, Routledge.[3] O'Donnell, R.M. (1989). Keynes: Philosophy, Economics and Politics, Macmillan.[4] O'Donnell, R.M. (1997). Keynes on Formalism. In G.C. Harcourt and P.A. Riach (eds) A `Second Edition' of the General Theory, Routledge.[5] Skidelsky, R. (1983). John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 1, Hopes Betrayed 1883-1920, Macmillan.[6] Skidelsky, R. (1992). John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 2: The Economist as Saviour 1920-1937, Macmillan.[7] Stigler, S.M. (1999). Statistics on the Table, Harvard University Press.

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Reprinted with permission fromChristopher Charles Heyde and Eugene William Seneta (Editors),Statisticians of the Centuries, Springer-Verlag Inc., New York, USA.