John Maynard Keynes Quotes About Economics
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I'd rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.
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Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits-a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.
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The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order.
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If, however, a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course, essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of the reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer.
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Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
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The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.
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Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency. . . Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose.
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Dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly.
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The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth -- he could at the same time and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprise of any quarter of the world -- he could secure forthwith, if he wished, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality.
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The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.
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The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.
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Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
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For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.
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The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45 [Hayek provided historical background up to page 45; after that came his theoretical model], and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.
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By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.
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Gold is a relic from a time when government's were less trustworthy in these matters (currency debasement) than they are now.
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There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.
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I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital-goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organizing investments.
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Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.
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Men will not always die quietly.
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Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth, if the education of our statesmen on the principles of the classical economics stands in the way of anything better.
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It economics is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions.
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I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.
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If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
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The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.
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Those, who are strongly wedded to what I shall call 'the classical theory', will fluctuate, I expect, between a belief that I am quite wrong and a belief that I am saying nothing new. It is for others to determine if either of these or the third alternative is right.
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Unlike physics, for example, such parts of the bare bones of economic theory as are expressible in mathematical form are extremely easy compared with the economic interpretation of the complex and incompletely known facts of experience, and lead one a very little way towards establishing useful results.
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Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
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This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
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He had one illusion - France; and one disillusion - mankind, including Frenchmen.
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