John Neville Keynes (31 August 1852 – 15 November 1949) was a British economist and father of John Maynard Keynes.

Biography

Born in Salisbury, he was the son of Dr John Keynes (1805–1878) and his wife Anna Maynard Neville (1821–1907). He was educated at Amersham Hall School, University College London and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow in 1876.[1] He held a lectureship in Moral Science from 1883 to 1911. He was elected as Registrary in 1910, and held that office until 1925.

He divided Economy into "positive economy" (the study of what is, and the way the economy works), "normative economy" (the study of what should be), and the "art of economics" (applied economics). The art of economics relates the lessons learned in positive economics to the normative goals determined in normative economics. He tried to synthesise deductive and inductive reasoning as a solution to the "Methodenstreit". His main works were:

Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic (1884)
The Scope and Method of Political Economy (1891)
He married, in 1882, Florence Ada Brown[2] (who was later a Mayor of Cambridge). They had two sons and a daughter:
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), the economist.
Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982), a surgeon.
Margaret Neville Keynes (1885–1974), who married Archibald Hill (winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize for Physiology) in 1913.

He outlived his elder son by three years and died aged 97.