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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.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on January 28, 2008 at 07:44 PM in History | Permalink
Comments
Oh, if only it were Friedman... would we even be reading this post?
Posted by: Stephen Downes at Jan 28, 2008 7:59:04 PM
Perhaps it's mean to be expressed Max U(c,a,w).
Posted by: Franklin Harris at Jan 28, 2008 8:01:27 PM
meant, that is
Posted by: Franklin Harris at Jan 28, 2008 8:02:50 PM
We really need the full dataset, to deduce whether they were substitutes or complements.
Posted by: Cormac at Jan 28, 2008 8:04:39 PM
C=catamite; A=adult male; W=woman?
Posted by: srp at Jan 28, 2008 9:02:05 PM
C=Coitus, of course
Posted by: Robert Olson at Jan 28, 2008 9:17:26 PM
Interesting! the other side of Keynes revealed!
Posted by: Chandan at Jan 28, 2008 9:27:19 PM
In the long run, we're all blind.
Posted by: Paul Zrimsek at Jan 28, 2008 9:34:13 PM
Vaginal Revolution, anyone?
Posted by: Hehe at Jan 28, 2008 9:47:03 PM
"...but in fact the totals for W are the lowest for the three categories"
All in all, I think we can now truly understand why Keynes thought demand created its own supply.
Posted by: DPT at Jan 28, 2008 10:04:49 PM
I wonder if "w" might be short for "double" rather than the letter itself.
Posted by: alexa-blue at Jan 28, 2008 10:37:00 PM
I would think the letters stand for people's names, no? That would explain why one of them pops up so much during university holidays, for instance. Given that Keynes wasn't so old at the time, one would assume that many of his encounters had more than one sex act. If a letter stands for a sex act, then why is there only one letter for each event? I think each letter stands for a name.
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Jan 28, 2008 11:34:02 PM
I think it's none of our business. Merely because the man is famous we feel the need to delve in to his private life? Keep to is public life, people. The mere fact that he wrote it in code means he didn't want people to know.
Posted by: Robert S. Porter at Jan 28, 2008 11:40:12 PM
The curious thing is the tally at the end with the seemingly random 'score'. What does the final tally imply? Why is there a large number of 70s-80s, and only a few 90s? I doubt that he is grading himself - if he was averaging his performance he would have listed an additional performance score to each encounter.
Posted by: DKK at Jan 29, 2008 12:11:14 AM
This only goes farther as evidence that EVERYTHING the man wrote was incoherent rubbish.
Posted by: The other Eric at Jan 29, 2008 12:20:04 AM
Might the C refer to our good old friend Colonel Angus?
Posted by: kranky kritter at Jan 29, 2008 12:28:39 AM
Ok, we know that Keynes was probably mostly gay and that he was a member of the Bloomsbury group. My guesses for names:
W = Virginia Woolf (Wittgenstein? Probably too early.)
A = Adrian Woolf (Woolf's younger brother)
C = Clive Bell (Vanessa Bell's (Virginia Woolf's sister) husband).
If it's sex acts, I'll go with the article.
Posted by: Selfreferencing at Jan 29, 2008 1:36:56 AM
Not only was he gay, he was a pedophile. His diary mentions sex with 12 and 13 year old boys. Yet the article from which this information comes mentions this without comment as if were completely legitimate, and the reactions here are perfectly benign. I'm outraged at the lack of outrage.
Posted by: anonymous at Jan 29, 2008 2:07:36 AM
"Merely because the man is famous we feel the need to delve in to his private life? Keep to is public life, people"
The stuff he did would land him in jail nowadays, so these aspects of his life are perfectly relevant.
Posted by: anonymous at Jan 29, 2008 2:12:10 AM
Coloured, white, Asian?
Posted by: phil at Jan 29, 2008 6:07:31 AM
anonymous,
The article does not mention Keynes having sex with 12 or 13 year old boys. It mentions him having sex with a 16 year old "boy". Today that would be considered statutory rape, not pedophilia. Indeed, lusting after teenagers is still a legit passtime. Ever hear the term jail bait?
And I should also mention that our age of consent is much higher than it was in those days. Folks were MARRIED by the age of 16. So Keynes may have still went to jail, but he was apparently not a deviant.
Posted by: Student at Jan 29, 2008 6:15:21 AM
And we care ...why???
Posted by: Scott at Jan 29, 2008 8:08:26 AM
"Oh, if only it were Friedman... would we even be reading this post?"
Hello?!!!
Posted by: Daniel Klein at Jan 29, 2008 8:21:57 AM
Not only was he gay, he was a pedophile.
Not only are you straight, you are a homophobe.
Posted by: Anonymous2 at Jan 29, 2008 8:52:40 AM
Since the man was a student of economics, lets not overlook the possibility that the numbers next to the letters are dollar amounts. Perhaps he was curious about sex transactions and paid for/was paid for sex acts.
Posted by: Stan at Jan 29, 2008 9:00:42 AM
