When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.
Interpretation
Wealth will lose its value in society, leading to a shift in moral values.
In this quote, John Maynard Keynes suggests that when society no longer prioritizes the accumulation of wealth, it will lead to significant changes in ethical standards and moral behavior. This indicates that our values are closely linked to the social importance we place on financial success, and a shift away from this focus may result in a more profound ethical transformation in how we relate to one another.
In practice
In a speech about societal values, one can reference this quote to underscore the diminishing importance of wealth in our moral framework.
As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method of investment is to put fairly large sums into enterprises which one thinks one knows something about and in the management of which one thoroughly believes.
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.
The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.
We will not have any more crashes in our time.
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.
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.
The problem is this. The spread of markets outpaces the ability of societies and their political systems to adjust to them, let alone to guide the course they take
No nation was ever ruined by trade.
Those who advocate devaluation are calling for a reduction in the wage levels and the real wage standards of every member of the working class.
Thirty years ago, many economists argued that inflation was a kind of minor inconvenience and that the cost of reducing inflation was too high a price to pay. No one would make those arguments today.
For most Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.
What I did not know yet about hunger, but would find out over the next twenty-one years, was that brilliant theorists of economics do not find it worthwhile to spend time discussing issues of poverty and hunger. They believe that these will be resolved when general economic prosperity increases. These economists spend all their talents detailing the process of development and prosperity, but rarely reflect on the origin and development of poverty and hunger. A a result, poverty continues.
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