Quotes About Keynes

As Keynes observed, there cannot be "liquidity" for the community as a whole.6

As Keynes observed, there cannot be "liquidity" for the community as a whole.6 The mistake is in thinking that markets have a duty to stay liquid or that buyers will always be present to accommodate sellers.

In September 1917, Keynes went to Washington for the first of his loan negotiations, and did not like the experience. 'The only really sympathetic and original thing in America is the niggers, who are charming,' he wrote to Duncan Grant.

Keynes's economics – unlike Keynesian economics – was philosophically driven. It was informed by his vision of the 'good life'; it was permeated by his theory of probability. These philosophical foundations were laid early in his life. Philosophy came before economics; and the philosophy of ends came before the philosophy of means.

Two books of essays also appeared – Essays in Persuasion (1931) and Essays in Biography (1933). The first collected what Keynes, in his introduction, called 'the croakings of twelve years – the croakings of a Cassandra who could never influence the course of events in time'. A notable feature of the second is Keynes's use of short lives of men of science to ponder and delineate the character of scientific genius.

It follows straightforwardly from Moore that goodness is increased, ceteris paribus, by an increase in the amount of beauty. Keynes acted on this belief both as a philanthropist, builder of the Cambridge Arts theatre, and by accepting the job of first chairman of the Arts Council.

The cancellation of inter-Ally war debts was designed to de-couple American finance from Europe. Keynes supported American loans to get European industry restarted, pay for essential food imports, and stabilize currencies. But he was adamantly opposed to Europeans borrowing from the United States to service deadweight debt. His book became an international best-seller, had a profound effect on post-war thinking, and made Keynes world-famous.

Another student, Lorie Tarshis, wrote: 'And finally what Keynes supplied was hope: hope that prosperity could be restored and maintained without the support of prison camps, executions and bestial interrogations….

These discussions are not just of historic interest. Keynes was the first economist to put uncertainty at the heart of the economic problem, and thus raise the issue of the scope and meaning of rationality in economics. Is rationality possible in an uncertain world, and how is it to be specified?

In three articles to The Times, published in October 1939, and reproduced as a pamphlet, How to Pay for the War, Keynes put forward a scheme for compulsory saving or 'deferred pay', in which excess purchasing power would be mopped up by a progressive surcharge on all incomes (with offsets to the poor in the form of family allowances), part of which would be given back in instalments after the war in order to counteract the anticipated post-war slump.

In 1939, Keynes had doubted whether 'capitalistic democracy' would ever be willing to make the 'grand experiment' which would prove his theory. In war the experiment was made, and the theory worked. The economy was run at full capacity with only very moderate inflation.

Keynes's second major contribution to the post-war order was his part in establishing the Bretton Woods system. This was unfinished business left over from the collapse of the old order. Even in his Tract period Keynes was not a currency floater. He wanted a 'managed' exchange-rate system – something consistent with de facto stability of exchange rates for long periods.

Keynes, far from being a wholehearted lover of freedom, viewed with some sympathy the fascist and Communist 'experiments' of the 1930s.

Sweezy argued on the basis of Marx and Keynes that "accumulation is the primary factor" in capitalist development, yet noted that its influence was waning. "There is no mechanism in the system," he explained, "for adjusting investment opportunities to the way capitalists want to accumulate and no reason to suppose that if investment opportunities are inadequate capitalists will turn to consumption—quite the contrary.

As a result, Keynes warned, the stock market would become "a battle of wits to anticipate the basis of conventional valuation a few months hence, rather than the prospective yield of an investment over a long term of years.

As Keynes said, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Keynes was scarcely a 'revolutionary' in any real sense. He possessed the tactical wit to dress up ancient statist and inflationist fallacies with modern, pseudoscientific jargon, making them appear to be the latest findings of economic science.

In order to conquer the world of economics with his new theory, it was critical for Keynes to destroy his rivals within Cambridge itself. In his mind, he who controlled Cambridge controlled the world.

Keynes's contribution was not just to advocate spending government money in the middle of a recession. Every government had done that going back to the days of the Irish potato famine. What he gave to us was a way of thinking about the magnitude and the dimensions and so forth.

The major reason for Keynes's rejection of communism was simply that he could scarcely identify with the grubby proletariat.

But the dreams of designing diplomats do not always prosper, and we must trust the future .

To spend this particular year reading essays to Dennis Robertson as one's supervisor, and, simultaneously, enjoying membership of the group round Keynes was indeed an intellectual treat.

Keynes was a great economist. In every discipline, progress comes from people who make hypotheses, most of which turn out to be wrong, but all of which ultimately point to the right answer. Now Keynes, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,set forth a hypothesis which was a beautiful one, and it really altered the shape of economics. But it turned out that it was a wrong hypothesis. That doesn't mean that he wasn't a great man!

Hayek later decided that what really separated him from his friend Keynes was that the latter always believed that certain advanced thinkers (Keynes among them, of course) could skillfully and accurately manipulate the social order to their own ends, without ill effects.