John Maynard Keynes (1883 – 1946)
British economist whose ideas, known as Keynesian economics, had a major impact on modern economic and political theory and on many governments' fiscal policies.
If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than from that of Marx.
You can't push on a string.
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.
We reach a condition where there is a shortage of houses, but where nevertheless no one can afford to live in the houses that there are.
We're all Keynesians now.
The next move is with the head, and fists must wait.
All production is for the purpose of ultimately satisfying a consumer.
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
I can be influenced by what seems to me to be justice and good sense; but the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.
We are, as I have said, one equation short.
Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10 000 years ago.
All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas — and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists.
"To dig holes in the ground", paid for out of savings, will increase, not only employment, but the real national dividend of useful goods and services. It is not reasonable, however, that a sensible community should be content to remain dependent on such fortuitous and often wasteful mitigations when once we understand the influences upon which effective demand depends.
If Mr. Lloyd George had no good qualities, no charms, no fascinations, he would not be dangerous. If he were not a syren, we need not fear the whirlpools.
Adam Smith and Malthus and Ricardo! There is something about these three figures to evoke more then ordinary sentiments from us their children in the spirit.
There is no harm in being sometimes wrong — especially if one is promptly found out.
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.
The consequences of Mr. Keynes's attack upon orthodoxy are very far reaching. First, it cuts the ground from under the pretended justification of inequality, and allows us to see the monstrous absurdity of our social system with a fresh eye.
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.