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.
Economic growth and environmental protection are not at odds. They're opposite sides of the same coin if you're looking at longer-term prosperity.
The gold standard did not collapse. Governments abolished it in order to pave the way for inflation. The whole grim apparatus of oppression and coercion, policemen, customs guards, penal courts, prisons, in some countries even executioners, had to be put into action in order to destroy the gold standard.
Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men.
Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment.
This power becomes particularly irresistible when exercised by those who, because they hold and control money, are able also to govern credit and determine its allotment, for that reason supplying, so to speak, the lifeblood to the entire economic body, and grasping, as it were, in their hands the very soul of production, so that no one dare breathe against their will.
The 'boom-bust' cycle is generated by monetary intervention in the market, specifically bank credit expansion to business.
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