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Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Alex Last.

And today we look back at the life of a man whose ideas on how to prevent economic collapse

transformed the 20th century and are still relevant today.

The economist John Maynard Keynes.

I began by saying that the grand experiment has begun.

If it works, I predict that we shall never go back all the way to the old state of affairs.

This is a rare recording of John Maynard Keynes, one of the great minds of the 20th century,

a founding father of macroeconomics, a mathematician, a financier and champion of the arts,

whose ideas shaped our world and whose ideas still matter today.

He was a kind of Confucius behind the political facade.

I mean he was certainly in my view the greatest economist of the 20th century. He was also one of the greatest minds because

he was more than an economist. Lord Robert Skedelski is a emeritus professor of political

economy at Warwick University and a biographer of Keynes.

He showed governments a way of preventing economic collapses like the Great Depression of the 1930s.

And that was supremely important politically because if you remember in the Great Depression

you had in Germany six million unemployed and Hitler came to power.

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