Niall Ferguson’s disparagement of John Maynard Keynes—he didn’t care about the implications of his economic policies because he was gay and had no children, etc.—have made the pages of the Times.

The comments Mr. Ferguson apologized for came in response to an audience question on Thursday at the Strategic Investment Conference in Carlsbad, Calif., where he was a featured speaker. The questioner mentioned the familiar Keynes adage favoring immediate government intervention in the economy: “in the long run we are all dead.”

According to a reporter for Financial Advisor, Mr. Ferguson’s language described Keynes as “effete,” and said about his marriage to a Russian ballerina that he was more likely to be speaking with her of “poetry” rather than procreation.

Let me flag one thing here, because I suspect no one else will: Ferguson’s remarks came at an investment conference he was presumably being well-paid to attend, something he does with remarkable frequency. At these conferences, there’s a lot of temptation to say things that aren’t really very smart, but you suspect, on some level, will please the crowd, and get you invited to more conferences, ka-ching.

As I wrote in this space last August,

[Ferguson’s] speeches are nice work if you can get it. But are they worth the damage to your reputation that comes from compromising your work?

Ferguson’s apology seems pretty heartfelt. The Times doesn’t include this, but he writes on his blog,

My colleagues, students, and friends – straight and gay – have every right to be disappointed in me, as I am in myself. To them, and to everyone who heard my remarks at the conference or has read them since, I deeply and unreservedly apologize.

On the other hand, he points out that this was “an off-the-cuff response that was not part of my presentation,” which to me only suggests that this is the kind of thing Ferguson says when he’s not being careful.

I’ve never met Niall Ferguson, and I’m sure that in person he can be quite charming. He’s got the accent, he’s a handsome guy (not that I’m effete or anything), and so on.

But there does seem to be a bit of the bully in him. Last August I wrote about Ferguson because of his deplorable and factually-challenged Newsweek piece attacking Barack Obama, and about the nasty response Ferguson gave after being widely criticized for his economic mistakes in the piece.

Ferguson said at the time:

….the spectacle of the American liberal blogosphere in one of its almost daily fits of righteous indignation is not so much ridiculous as faintly sinister. Why? Because what I have encountered since the publication of my Newsweek article criticizing President Obama looks suspiciously like an orchestrated attempt to discredit me.

Mmmm…no.

Or maybe Ferguson just has a streak of immaturity in him—he likes to say things for shock value, then he’s surprised and outraged when people are shocked by them.

I rarely agree with Jonah Goldberg, but I’ll grant him this argument that there’s nothing inherently wrong in saying that one’s intellectual views can be shaped by life experience. Of course they can; it’s harder to imagine that they can’t.

But I do think it’s all about the way in which says these things, particularly when you’re talking about a charged subject such as homosexuality. Ferguson doesn’t sound like he was making a serious argument, just being flip—and that’s when it gets ugly.

George Chauncey, a Yale scholar of gays in American history, in an interview emphasized that he was not weighing in on the economic arguments involved, but noted that Mr. Ferguson’s comments resembled past attempts to undercut gays in public life.

I think it’s probably too much to say that that’s what Ferguson was up to, but that may have been a consequence of his remarks; you can see all these bankers walking away saying, oh, we don’t have to worry about Keynes now, the guy was a fruit. Which is what Ferguson probably should apologize for.