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.
Interpretation
Keynes critiques the relevance of long-term economic predictions in the face of immediate challenges.
John Maynard Keynes emphasizes that focusing solely on long-term outcomes of economic policies can be misleading, particularly in times of crisis. He argues that during turbulent periods, the immediate realities and struggles of the present demand attention, as the future is uncertain and can render current concerns trivial if they are ignored.
In practice
During a lecture on economic theories, this quote could highlight the importance of addressing current events.
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.
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.
If farming were to be organised like the stock market, a farmer would sell his farm in the morning when it was raining, only to buy it back in the afternoon when the sun came out.
The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-unon-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures, as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline.
This is the paradox of thrift: belt-tightening causes people to lose their jobs, because other people are not buying what they produce, so their debt burden rises rather than falls.
We have designed a capitalist system wrong. We assume human beings are one-dimensional, all they do is make money, so we've created a money-centric world.
It is regrettable that people think about our monetary system, and of our economic structure, only in times of depression.
If the job of capitalism is to create wealth for those who put up the capital, no fund group comes close to Vanguard's success in serving its owners. So we're probably as far away from communism as is realistically possible.
Prosperity cannot be restored by raids upon the public Treasury.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.