Quotes About Keynes

More than 80 years ago, John Maynard Keynes explained why market economies often have persistent unemployment and taught us how government could maintain the economy at or near full employment.

Where did Keynes stand on overt fascism? From the scattered information now available, it should come as no surprise that Keynes was an enthusiastic advocate of the 'enterprising spirit' of Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder and leader of British fascism, in calling for a comprehensive 'national economic plan' in late 1930.

At present, Keynes said in 1926, everything is politics, and nothing policies.

Keynes preferred memoirs as 'more agreeable and amusing, so much more touching, bringing so much more of the pattern of life, than … the daydreams of a nervous wreck, which is the average modern novel'.

He detested the inefficiency of unregulated capitalism only less than he dreaded the waste and suffering of a proletarian revolution,' wrote Kingsley Martin, who edited the New Statesman when Keynes was chairman of its publishing company: 'he therefore made it his life's work to save capitalism by altering its nature.

Men like Crawford mistrusted Keynes because his views were unconfused. Throughout his life Keynes produced unimpeachable facts and figures, clear analyses, direct solutions and trenchant practical advice all based on the nitty-gritty of his subject, which were discounted by officials, politicians and bankers who dismissed him as academic, theoretical, quixotic, impractical. To them his clarity seemed too good to be true.

Of course, coaches are Humans. They tend to do things the way they have always been done, because those decisions will not be second-guessed by the boss. As Keynes noted, following the conventional wisdom keeps you from getting fired.

Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement.

Eighty years ago, John Maynard Keynes put it best: I do not feel that selling at very low prices is a remedy for having failed to sell at high ones. . . . I would say that it is from time to time the duty of the serious investor to accept the depreciation of his holdings with equanimity and without reproaching himself.

John Maynard Keynes criticized fiduciaries for preferring to "fail conventionally" rather than taking, as Swensen so often does, direct responsibility for independent, even pioneering thought and action.

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen.

I fancied myself as some kind of god or an economic reformer like Keynes

There are still many people in America who regard depressions as acts of God. I think Keynes proved that the responsibility for these occurrences does not rest with Providence.

The urge to self-deception, which seemed to Keynes fundamental to untrained and thoughtless people, was what he most resisted. Public opinion he recognized as gullible, uninformed, wayward and super-abundant in misplaced confidence. Improvisations, expedients and thoughtless half-truths led to blunders, as he was to demonstrate in The Economic Consequences of the Peace.

Keynes was patrician in outlook. He suspected that liberty was incompatible with equality, and had a sharp preference for liberty over the chimera of equality.

Disciples of Keynes, who focus on aggregate demand, view any increase in household wealth as raising employment because they say it adds to consumer demand.

In 1936, John Maynard Keynes predicted the 'euthanasia of the rentier' before the end of the 20th century. It did not happen.

Keynes declared capitalism the best system ever devised to achieve a civilized economic society. But he recognized in it two major faults—"its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

It is true that Keynes's 'model' was a short-run model, but that's not because he was interested only in short-run stabilization. He wanted a full employment level of investment in the short-run, so as to get to the long-run quicker.

A case can be made out for both positions. What distances Keynes most obviously from the 'progressives' is his attitude to social justice. Keynes did not object (or object strongly) to the existing social order on the ground that it unfairly or unjustly distributed life-chances;

Keynes emphatically rejected socialism as an economic remedy for the ills of capitalism. Both classical economists and socialists, he often said, believed in the same 'laws of economics'. But whereas the former regarded them as true and inevitable, the latter saw them as true and intolerable. Keynes proposed to show they were not true.

Keynes had his own Utopia which inspired his work as an economist, expressed notably in his essay, 'Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren', published in 1930.

Keynes eliminated economic theory's ancient role as spoilsport for inflationist and statist schemes, leading a new generation of economists on to academic power and to political pelf and privilege.

After leaving the Arts Council in 2009, he pointed out that, in the official portraits of past Council chairmen, John Maynard Keynes was the only one smiling. That was because Keynes died before ever having to chair a Council meeting.25