The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.
Interpretation
Skilled investment aims to counteract the negative impacts of time and ignorance on our future prosperity.
John Maynard Keynes emphasizes the importance of skilled investment in safeguarding the future against the detrimental effects of time and ignorance. He suggests that the act of investing wisely is not merely a financial task; rather, it serves a greater social purpose by enabling progress and mitigating risks that threaten our collective advancements.
In practice
In a talk about sustainable investing, one might quote Keynes to illustrate the importance of forward-thinking investment strategies.
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.
Thousands of important and intelligent men have never been able to grasp the principle of comparative advantage or believe it even after it was explained to them
Unfair servicing practices can worsen a family's already difficult economic situation, and the injury echoes from the family to the community and ultimately throughout the economy.
Close the weak banks and impose serious capital requirements on the strong ones...You see, it may sound hard-hearted, but you cannot keep unsound financial institutions operating simply because they provide jobs.
Nothing so weakens government as persistent inflation.
Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.
What brought mass innovation to a nation was not scientific advances - its own or others' - but 'economic dynamism': the desire and the space to innovate.
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