Animal Spirits

Keynes kept two sex diaries.  The first documents people…

The other sex diary is more puzzling and, in a way, more informative. An economist to the core, Keynes organized the second sex diary also year-by-year, but this time in quarterly increments.

Unfortunately for us, however, this second sex diary is in code. And as far as I know, no one yet has been prurient enough to crack it.

Here’s what Keynes’ tabulation looks like. For every quarter-year from 1906 to 1915, he tallies up his sexual activities and totals them under three categories: C, A, and W.

…according to Keynes’ tabulation, what he did most frequently and consistently was C. It happened seventeen times from May to August of 1908, twenty-eight times (!) from August to November that year, twenty times from February to May of 1909, and so on. That’s a lot of C. The high numbers for C loosely (but not consistently) correlate to university holidays, the break at Easter and the longer summer holiday, when Keynes would have had more leisure to pursue and enjoy his bouts of C.

More here.  I debated whether to close comments on this post but I trust Marginal Revolution readers to keep to their high standards.

Hat tip to Kottke.org.

Comments

Comments for this post are closed