John Maynard Keynes
In 1924 John Maynard Keynes wrote an obituary for a prominent economist Alfred Marshall, one of the founders of the English neoclassical economics and Keynes’ former tutor and academic patron. In this fascinating piece of work Keynes astoundingly mulls over Marshall’s economic scholarship and intellectual life. Joseph Schumpeter, in his obit of Keynes, called this obituary “the most brilliant life of a man of science I have ever read.” (2003: 271).
At the beginning of this essay, Keynes sketches the “ideal type” of an economist, outlining his preferable professional features and personal characteristics. So, who is an economist according to Keynes? Here is his abundant answer:
“The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy or pure science? An easy subject at which few excel! The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Mar 21, 2015 @ 06:22:50
Ronald Coase, in Chapter 9 of Essays on Economics and Economists, points out that Keynes’ account of Marshall’s ancestry in the essay is far from accurate. It’s an entertaining and detailed account.
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