David Frum

And if you were to say, what are the gifts?

What are the things that they might bring with them, like the magi?

Tell us at the end, finally, about the work you're doing now.

What are the things that in your personal work you think are important that get you up in the morning?

Okay.

So while you're there in bed with the covers over your head and thinking maybe this was all a terrible dream, the voice of conscience that says, no, you have to get out and do it.

What is that voice reminding you of?

Mona Charon, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Brum Show.

Thanks so much to Mona Charon for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

As mentioned at the top, my book this week is actually an essay, My Early Beliefs, by the great English economist John Maynard Keynes.

Since Mona and I spent so much time discussing our own political evolution, I thought it might be interesting to turn to what is maybe the most famous such discussion ever written, and that is Keynes' essay, which he delivered as an after-dinner speech in 1938.

Keynes graduated from Cambridge in the early part of the 20th century, and in 1938, he and a group of his Cambridge friends gathered together for dinner to look back on the changes in their lives over the past third of a century.

Keynes delivered this paper talking about the way that he and his friends had changed their minds about important issues.

In the last bit of this essay, which is only 13 pages long,

Keynes reflects on one of the important shocks that came to him and came to his friends since their undergraduate days.

Now, the early part of the 20th century was, if you were an Englishman of bourgeois background, as Keynes was and as his friends were, a time of extraordinary security.

Those of you who have recently watched On Your Own or With Children, the Mary Poppins movie, will remember George Banks, the patriarch banker, singing It's Good to Be an Englishman in 1910.

And so, if you came from John Maynard Keynes' background, so it was.

It was good to be an Englishman.

in 1910 or 1904 or 5 when Keynes was at Cambridge.