Keynes Quotes

“When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done”
― John Maynard Keynes

“Socialism is not a competition; it is not a monopoly, either. Socialism is not a private property; it is not a state one, either. Socialism is a completely different thing. What is socialism in such case?”
― Todor Bombov, Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code-Socialism with a Human Face

“In the conditions of this “New World Order,” a crucial part of the contemporary world economy is a criminal economy, in which the excess profits are accumulated not by the production of material comforts, but by drug-traffic, arms trafficking, and human trafficking, including prostitution. The contemporary world economy is an economy of the global organized criminality whose eminently form is the modern capitalist state. The contemporary world economy is an economy not of the real commodity production, but an economy of the jobbery; this is expressed directly in supply and demand of the capital of the speculation, i.e., in the fictitious capital trade, in the antagonistic games with share capital in the stock exchange. Just Wall Street’s stock exchange, i.e., the world speculative capital market, is the contemporary tremendous pump for inflation of the balloons of the world economic crises, the last one of which began in 2007. The aggregate amount of the bonds on the world market, as many economists know, is over one hundred trillion US dollars! Without taking in mind the derivatives! If including those, the aggregate amount is several times more! This is an enormous balloon as inflated as a red giant star! And when added to this amount the world market of the shares, the passing each other between real and fictitious capital grows to cosmic dimensions! This cosmic balloon will burst very soon! That means the most destructive capitalist crisis in human history lies just round the corner, the global economic apocalypse is just forthcoming! This ruin will be due to the stock exchange antagonistic games, the stock exchange that is, as a matter of fact, a gambling house! Because the securities and shares’ trading is sheer gambling! This becomes clear by the direct proportionality between risk and profitability, the more risk—the more profitability, and vice versa! However, this is gambling in which the stakes are not simply money, but millions and billions of human fates. So, this is a destroying-the-civilization-world crime economy!”
― Todor Bombov, Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code-Socialism with a Human Face

“..either immediately or ultimately every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation. Once we look at the matter. In this way, the supposed miracles of government spending will appear in another light.”
― Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson

“There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: "In the long run we are all dead." And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.”
― Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson

“This book (Jarod Kintz's book) is trash. I mean, I assume it is, because that's where I found it while scrounging for lunch. However, I must admit that I haven't read it. I would have, but I am homeless, mainly due to my illiteracy (though Big Government, Keynesian monetary policy, and my struggle with alcoholism certainly played a large role).”
― Dora J. Arod

“I find economics increasingly satisfactory, and I think I am rather good at it. I want to manage a railroad or organise a Trust or at least swindle the investing public”
― John Maynard Keynes

“The individualist insists that drastic depressions are the result of credit inflation; (not excessive savings, as the Keynesians would have it) which at all times in history has been caused by direct government action or by government influence. As for aggravated unemployment, the individualist insists that it is exclusively the result of government intervention through inflation, wage rigidities, burdensome taxes, and restrictions on trade and production such as price controls and tariffs. The inflation that comes inevitably with government pump-priming soon catches up with the laborer, wipes away any real increase in his wages, discourages private investment, and sets off a new deflationary spiral which can in turn only be counteracted by more coercive and paternalistic government policies. And so it is that the "long run" is very soon a-coming, and the harmful effects of government intervention are far more durable than those that are sustained by encouraging the unhampered free market to work out its own destiny.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom'

“The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher - in some degree. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician.”
― John Maynard Keynes

“The science of public happiness was how Keynes saw his work as an economist.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“Our attitude to these criticisms must be determined by our whole moral and emotional reaction to the future of international relations and the Peace of the World.”
― John Maynard Keynes

“The war has ended with every one owing every one else immense sums of money. Germany owes a large sum to the Allies, the Allies owe a large sum to Great Britain, and Great Britain owes a large sum to the United States. The holders of war loan in every country are owed a large sum by the States, and the States in its turn is owed a large sum by these and other taxpayers. The whole position is in the highest degree artificial, misleading, and vexatious. We shall never be able to move again, unless we can free our limbs from these paper shackles.”
― John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace

“But if America recalls for a moment what Europe has meant to her and still means to her, what Europe, the mother of art and of knowledge, in spite of everything, still is and still will be, will she not reject these counsels of indifference and isolation, and interest herself in what may prove decisive issues for the progress and civilization of all mankind?”
― John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace

“Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid", whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“In a BBC broadcast in 1934, when he was a year away from finishing The General Theory, Keynes pinpointed the fundamental difference between an approach to the Depression based on frictions and imperfections and an approach based on more fundamental defects in the market system:
'On the one side were those who believe that the existing economics system is, in the long run, a self-adjusting system though with creaks and groans and jerks, and interrupted by time-lags, outside interference and mistakes ...
The strength of the self-adjusting school depends on its having behind it almost the whole body of organized thinking and doctrine of the last hundred years.
If the heretics on the other side of the gulf [among whom Keynes included himself] are to demolish the forces of nineteenth century orthodoxy ... they must attack them in their citadel.”
― Stephen A. Marglin, Raising Keynes: A Twenty-First-Century General Theory

“Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“He was sceptical about the value of almost all work, save for the pleasure it gives the worker,' reported Virginia Woolf. 'He works only because he likes it.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines

“At present", Keynes said in 1926, "everything is politics, and nothing policies.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“Weintraub was an excellent student of both microtheory as well as Keynes’s General Theory.”
― Paul Davidson

“Keynes concluded that citizens both rich and poor would have to be led gradually out of capitalism, a base and repugnant system of morals. His fellow liberals in the 1920s debated the morality and efficacy of capitalism, as well as the correctness of the view that, as one Liberal politician put it, “man’s primary concern is to satisfy in ever ampler degree his physical needs.” For Keynes, this might be human nature, but his entanglement with Bateson and Pearson had immersed him in the notion that biological nature was malleable.
Greed would be driven out not just by education but by the eugenic cultivation of “special talents.” It would be replaced by “some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue—that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow.” In the meantime, however, Keynes conceded capitalism’s efficacy. In order to improve productivity to the point where everyone’s needs could be easily satisfied, the coming century still demanded devotion to the god of greed. The goal of the next hundred years of capitalism would be its own extirpation.”
― David Roth Singerman

“Sometime in the early 1920s, Keynes outlined a book he planned to call “Essays on the Economic Future of the World” (figure 3).101 The chapter titles mostly represent the issues—inequality, agricultural prices, the singular circumstances of the nineteenth century—that occupied him throughout the decade, and whose resolution constituted his various versions of the Liberal platform. Population, the third chapter, was always at the top of his agendas for the next Liberal government. The concluding chapter, however, is the more enigmatic “Education, Eugenics and Φυσει δουλοι.” Keynes took the phrase “Φυσει δουλοι” (phusei douloi), “slaves by nature,” from the first book of Aristotle’s Politics. It is with the qualities of human beings that Aristotle begins: “One that can foresee with his mind is naturally ruler and naturally master, and one that can [work] with his body is subject and naturally a slave.” For Aristotle, an enlightened polity recognizes that these two kinds of people are bound by their mutual interest, and social stability requires that both embrace their natural and symbiotic relationship. Keynes, envisioning a new kind of relationship between state and citizen, had in mind a similar symbiosis, but one in which the eugenic cultivation of talent might reshape rather than harden existing social strata.”
― David Roth Singerman

“It would take expert navigators, like economists, to steer the world through the purgatory of capitalism and arrive at a future not just of leisure but also of morality. To ensure that human beings would be able to seize their opportunity for an ethical society, one devoted to good ends and rid of foul means, society would have to concern itself with both quality and quantity of population. As long as there was un- satisfied need, Keynes said in 1928, it would “remain reasonable to be economically purposive for others after it has ceased to be reasonable for oneself.” Here was the objective of Keynes’s idiosyncratic eugenics, one that connected the ethics of obligation to plans for social and economic management. Only when the condition of wantlessness “has become so general that the nature of one’s duty to one’s neighbour is changed” would progress truly have been made”
― David Roth Singerman

“In the last chapter of the /General Theory, /quoted above,^35 he [Keynes] falls into the fallacy of supposing that there is some kind of /neutral /policy that a Government can pursue, to maintain effective demand in general, without having any influence upon any particular demand for anything. The Government has to undertake “the task of adjusting to one another the propensity to consume and the inducement to invest” but everything else is best left to “the free play of economic forces.”^36

This is a metaphysical conception as unseizable as /abstract labour /or /total utility. /What is a policy which /merely /adjusts the demand for investable resources to the supply?

To increase effective demand when it threatens to flag, various means can be used: to reduce taxation or to shift the burden from those most likely to increase their consumption to those most likely to reduce their savings; to foster competition so as to reduce profit margins; to increase subsidies or outlays on social services — all means which tend to reduce inequalities in consumption. Or Government expenditure on investment can be increased, directly or through nationalized industries, or reductions in taxation and credit policy can be used to encourage private investment. Contrariwise, when effective demand seems excessive, taxes to discourage consumption, credit restriction and reduced Government expenditure can be brought into play. And all this has to be worked out so as to preserve the balance of trade at some level or other, as well as to preserve employment. What is a /neutral /policy? What mixture of these means is it that leaves private enterprise unaffected in content and acts only on the quantity?
[pp. 89-90]”
― Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy

“After the war, when the problem of deficient effective demand seemed to
have faded into the background, a fresh question came to the fore —
long-run development.

The change arose partly from the internal evolution of economics as an
academic subject. The solution of one problem opens up the next; once
Keynes’ short-period theory had been established, in which investment
plays the key role, it was evidently necessary to discuss the
consequences of the accumulation of capital that investment brings about. [p. 92]”
― Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy

“The analysis of the /General Theory /shows that inflation is a real, not
a monetary, phenomenon. It operates in two stages (once more giving a
crudely simple account of an intricate process). An increase in
effective demand meeting an inelastic supply of goods raises prices.
When food is supplied by a peasant agriculture a rise of the prices of
foodstuffs is a direct increase of money income to the sellers and
increases their expenditure. The higher cost of living sets up a
pressure to raise
wage rates. So money incomes rise all round, prices are bid up all the
higher and a vicious spiral sets in.

The first stage — a rise of effective demand — can very easily be
prevented by not having any development. But if there is to be
development there must be a stage when investment increases relatively
to consumption. There must be an increase in effective demand and a
tendency towards inflation. The problem is how to keep it within bounds.

Some schemes of investment that seem to be clearly indispensable to
improvements in the long run, such as electrical installations, take a
long time to yield any fruit and meanwhile the workers engaged on these
have to be supplied. The secret of non-inflationary development is to
allocate the right amount of quick-yielding, capital-saving investment
to the consumption-good sector (especially agriculture) to generate a
sufficient surplus to support the necessary large schemes.

It is in this kind of analysis, rather than in the mystifications of
“deficit finance,” that the clue to inflation is to be found. [pp. 110-11]”
― Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy

“The /utility /economists, according to Wicksell, were committed to a “thoroughly revolutionary programme” precisely on this question of distribution of income.^9 Marshall, and to some extent Pigou, got out of the fix that their theory had landed them in by emphasizing the danger to total physical national income that would be associated with an attempt to increase its /utility /by making its distribution more equal. This argument has been spoiled by the Keynesian revolution. If, as Keynes expected, saving is more than sufficient for a satisfactory rate of private investment, to use it for social purpose is not only harmless but actually beneficial to National Income, while if more total saving is needed than would be forthcoming under /laisser faire /it can easily be supplemented by budget surpluses.

Edgworth, as we saw above,^10 and many after him, took refuge in the argument that we do not really know that greater equality would promote greater happiness, because individuals differ in their capacity for happiness, so that, until we have a thoroughly scientific hedonimeter, “the principle ‘every man, and every woman, to count for one,’ should be very cautiously applied.”^11

Many years ago, this point of view was expressed by Professor Harberler: “How do I know that it hurts you more to have your leg cut off than it hurts me to be pricked by a pin?” It seemed at the time that it would have been more telling if he had put it the other way round.

Such arguments are getting rather dangerous nowadays, for though we shall presumably never have a hedonimeter whose findings would be unambiguous, the scientific measurement of pain is fairly well developed, and it would be very surprising if a national survey of the distribution of susceptibility to pain turned out to have just the same skew as the distribution of income.

If the question is once put: Would a greater contribution to human welfare be made by an investment in capacity to produce knick-knacks that have to be advertised in order to be sold or an investment in improving the health service, it seems to me that the answer would be only too obvious; the best reply that /laisser-faire /ideology can offer is not to ask the question. [pp. 127-8]”
― Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy

“In some ways the most striking novelty in Keynesian doctrine was that
(abstracting from effects on foreign trade) an all-round reduction in
wages would not reduce unemployment and (introducing Kalecki’s
elaboration) would actually be likely to increase it. [p. 129]”
― Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy

“There was frequently a moral lesson lurking just below the surface in Hayek’s accounts, usually having to do with Keynes’s overweening self- confidence and the dangers of hubris. His retelling of their final conversation is illustrative. Hayek had asked Keynes whether he was at all concerned about the uses to which his disciples were putting his theories, and in particular, whether a theory that had made sense in “the age of plenty” of the 1930s might not stimulate inflation as the economy neared full employment. Keynes assured Hayek that were his theories ever to become harmful, he could turn public opinion against them like that, and snapped his fingers. Unfortunately, as Hayek concluded, “six weeks later he was dead”.”
― Bruce Caldwell, Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950

“Those concessions might also explain why Keynes responded to the book as he did, a response that might surprise later generations. Keynes read it on the boat on the way to Bretton Woods, and on arriving in Atlantic City sent a letter saying that it was a “grand book” and that “morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement with it, but in a deeply moved agreement” (Keynes to Hayek, June 28, 1944, quoted in Keynes 1980b, 385). Keynes went on to say that they would probably disagree on the question of where to draw the line regarding more or less intervention. Keynes thought that almost certainly more planning was necessary, which could be carried out safely if the lead- ers were “rightly orientated in their own minds and hearts to the moral is- sue” (Keynes 1980b, 387). So there were obvious differences between them. But the general sentiment expressed underlines once again the fact that in the context of their times and especially with respect to central planning and the men of science who advocated such a path for Britain, Keynes and Hayek were on the same side.”
― Bruce Caldwell, Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950

“Tim Kasser: ‘The heyday of humanistic psychology was in the 1960s and 1970s, when Keynes dominated. But since the rise of neo-liberalism from the 1980s, we’ve seen an influx of cognitive behavioural approaches and psychiatric drugs – technologies that put the cause of the problem right between your ears. The therapies our governments now want all focus on internal not external reform. They don’t see suffering as a call to change external circumstances for the good of our development.”
― James Davies, Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis