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I See, Therefore, The Rentier Aspect Of Capitalism As A Transitional Phase Which Will Disappear When It Has Done Its Work. And With The Disappearance Of Its Rentier Aspect Much Else In It Besides Will Suffer A Sea-change. It Will Be, Moreover, A Great Advantage Of The Order Of Events Which I Am Advocating, That The Euthanasia Of The Rentier, Of The Functionless Investor, Will Be Nothing Sudden, Merely A Gradual But Prolonged Continuance Of What We Have Seen Recently In Great Britain, And Will Need No Revolution.

-John Maynard Keynes

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I See, Therefore, The

John Maynard Keynes

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I See, Therefore, The Rentier Aspect Of Capitalism As A Transitional Phase Which Will Disappear When It Has Done Its Work. And With The Disappearance Of Its Rentier Aspect Much Else In It Besides Will Suffer A Sea-change. It Will Be, Moreover, A Great Advantage Of The Order Of Events Which I Am Advocating, That The Euthanasia Of The Rentier, Of The Functionless Investor, Will Be Nothing Sudden, Merely A Gradual But Prolonged Continuance Of What We Have Seen Recently In Great Britain, And Will Need No Revolution.

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It Is Generally Agreed That Casinos Should, In The Public Interest, Be Inaccessible And Expensive. And Perhaps The Same Is True Of Stock Exchanges.

Ideas, Knowledge, Art, Hospitality, Travel - These Are Things Which Should In Their Nature Be International. But Let Goods Be Homespun Whenever It Is Reasonably And Conveniently Possible And Above All Let Finance Be Primarily National.

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

The Markets Are Moved By Animal Spirits, And Not By Reason.

I Am Sure That The Power Of Vested Interests Is Vastly Exaggerated Compared With The Gradual Encroachment Of Ideas.

I Believe Myself To Be Writing A Book On Economic Theory Which Will Largely Revolutionize - Not, I Suppose, At Once But In The Course Of The Next Ten Years - The Way The World Thinks About Economic Problems.

The Right Remedy For The Trade Cycle Is Not To Be Found In Abolishing Booms And Thus Keeping Us Permanently In A Semi-slump; But In Abolishing Slumps And Thus Keeping Us Permanently In A Quasi-boom.

The Boom, Not The Slump, Is The Right Time For Austerity At The Treasury.

He Had One Illusion - France; And One Disillusion - Mankind, Including Frenchmen.

Thus Those Reformers, Who Look For A Remedy By Creating Artificial Carrying-costs For The Money Through The Device Of Requiring Legal-tender Currency To Be Periodically Stamped At A Prescribed Cost In Order To Retain Its Quality As Money, Or In Analogous Ways, Have Been On The Right Track; And The Practical Value Of Their Proposals Deserves Consideration.

I Do Not Know Which Makes A Man More Conservative - To Know Nothing But The Present, Or Nothing But The Past.

There Is No Intrinsic Reason For The Scarcity Of Capital.

The Class War Will Find Me On The Side Of The Educated Bourgeoisie.

It Is A Mistake To Think That One Limits One’s Risk By Spreading Too Much Between Enterprises About Which One Knows Little And Has No Reason For Special Confidence.

Never In History Was There A Method Devised Of Such Efficacy For Setting Each Country's Advantage At Variance With Its Neighbours' As The International Gold (or, Formerly, Silver) Standard.

Long Run Is A Misleading Guide To Current Affairs. In The Long Run We Are All Dead.

I Should Have Drunk More Champagne.

How Long Will It Be Necessary To Pay City Men So Entirely Out Of Proportion To What Other Servants Of Society Commonly Receive For Performing Social Services Not Less Useful Or Difficult?

The Friends Of Gold Will Have To Be Extremely Wise And Moderate If They Are To Avoid A Revolution.

The Power To Become Habituated To His Surroundings And Therefore To No Longer Be Grateful For What Is Good In It Is A Marked Characteristic Of Mankind And Needs To Be Fought Against If A Person Is To Be Happy.

The Idea Behind Stamped Money Is Sound.

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In Truth, The Gold Standard Is Already A Barbarous Relic.

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There Is Nothing So Disastrous As A Rational Investment Policy In An Irrational World.

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It Is The Duty Of The Long-term Investor To Endure Great Losses With Equanimity.

Gold Is A Relic From A Time When Government's Were Less Trustworthy In These Matters (currency Debasement) Than They Are Now.

The Considerations Upon Which Expectations Of Prospective Yields Are Based Are Partly Existing Facts Which We Can Assume To Be Known More Or Less For Certain, And Partly Future Events Which Can Only Be Forecasted With More Or Less Confidence.

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It Would Not Be Foolish To Contemplate The Possibility Of A Far Greater Progress Still.

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If The Treasury Were To Fill Old Bottles With Bank-notes, Bury Them At Suitable Depths In Disused Coal-mines Which Are Then Filled Up To The Surface With Town Rubbish, And Leave It To Private Enterprise On Well-tried Principles Of Laissez-faire To Dig The Notes Up Again (the Right To Do So Being Obtained, Of Course, By Tendering For Leases Of The Note-bearing Territory), There Need Be No More Unemployment And, With The Help Of Repercussions, The Real Income Of The Community, And Its Capital Wealth, Would Probably Become A Good Deal Greater Than It Actually Is.

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But The Dreams Of Designing Diplomats Do Not Always Prosper, And We Must Trust The Future .

Newton Was A Judaic Monotheist Of The School Of Maimonides

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Like Odysseus, The President Looked Wiser When He Was Seated.

Markets Can Remain Irrational Longer Than You Can Remain Solvent.

The Great Events Of History Are Often Due To Secular Changes In The Growth Of Population And Other Fundamental Economic Causes, Which, Escaping By Their Gradual Character The Notice Of Contemporary Observers, Are Attributed To The Follies Of Statesmen Or The Fanaticism Of Atheists .

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Individual Happiness

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It Is Astonishing What Foolish Things One Can Temporarily Believe If One Thinks Too Long Alone, Particularly In Economics.

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When The Accumulation Of Wealth Is No Longer Of High Social Importance, There Will Be Great Changes In The Code Of Morals.

I Was Suffering From My Chronic Delusion That One Good Share Is Safer Than Ten Bad Ones, And I Am Always Forgetting That Hardly Anyone Else Shares This Particular Delusion.

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Great Depression

If You Owe Your Bank Manager A Thousand Pounds, You Are At His Mercy. If You Owe Him A Million Pounds, He Is At Your Mercy.

It Economics Is A Method Rather Than A Doctrine, An Apparatus Of The Mind, A Technique Of Thinking Which Helps Its Possessor To Draw Correct Conclusions.

I Work For A Government I Despise For Ends I Think Criminal.

[t]he Theory Of Output As A Whole, Which Is What The Following Book Purports To Provide, Is Much More Easily Adapted To The Conditions Of A Totalitarian State, Than Is The Theory Of Production And Distribution Of A Given Output Produced Under The Conditions Of Free Competition And A Large Measure Of Laissez-faire.

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In The Long Run We Are All Dead.

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Those, Who Are Strongly Wedded To What I Shall Call 'the Classical Theory', Will Fluctuate, I Expect, Between A Belief That I Am Quite Wrong And A Belief That I Am Saying Nothing New. It Is For Others To Determine If Either Of These Or The Third Alternative Is Right.

I Can't Remember My Telephone Number, But I Know It Was In The High Numbers.

By A Continuing Process Of Inflation, Government Can Confiscate, Secretly And Unobserved, An Important Part Of The Wealth Of Their Citizens.

It Has Been Pointed Out Already That No Knowledge Of Probabilities, Less In Degree Than Certainty, Helps Us To Know What Conclusions Are True, And That There Is No Direct Relation Between The Truth Of A Proposition And Its Probability. Probability Begins And Ends With Probability.

Men Will Not Always Die Quietly.

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

But Whilst There May Be Intrinsic Reasons For The Scarcity Of Land, There Are No Intrinsic Reasons For The Scarcity Of Capital.

Words Ought To Be A Little Wild, For They Are The Assault Of Thoughts On The Unthinking.

Lenin Is Said To Have Declared That The Best Way To Destroy The Capitalistic System Was To Debauch The Currency. . . Lenin Was Certainly Right. There Is No Subtler, No Surer Means Of Overturning The Existing Basis Of Society Than To Debauch The Currency. The Process Engages All The Hidden Forces Of Economic Law On The Side Of Destruction, And Does It In A Manner Which Not One Man In A Million Can Diagnose.

Most Men Love Money And Security More, And Creation And Construction Less, As They Get Older.

The Businessman Is Only Tolerable So Long As His Gains Can Be Held To Bear Some Relation To What, Roughly And In Some Sense, His Activities Have Contributed To Society.

The Key To Selecting The Winner Isn't Choosing The Face You Think Is The Most Beautiful But Rather The Face Other People Will Pick

Nor Should The Argument Seem Strange That Taxation May Be So High As To Defeat Its Object, And That, Given Sufficient Time To Gather The Fruits, A Reduction Of Taxation Will Run A Better Chance Than An Increase Of Balancing The Budget.

Economists Must Leave To Adam Smith Alone The Glory Of The Quarto, Must Pluck The Day, Fling Pamphlets Into The Wind, Write Always Sub Specie Temporis , And Achieve Immortality By Accident, If At All.

The Spectacle Of Modern Investment Markets Has Sometimes Moved Me Towards The Conclusion That To Make The Purchase Of An Investment Permanent And Indissoluble, Like Marriage, Except By Reason Of Death Or Other Grave Cause, Might Be A Useful Remedy For Our Contemporary Evils. For This Would Force The Investor To Direct His Mind To The Long-term Prospects And To Those Only.

The Avoidance Of Taxes Is The Only Intellectual Pursuit That Still Carries Any Reward.

Businessmen Have A Different Set Of Delusions From Politicians; And Need, Therefore, Different Handling. They Are, However, Much Milder Than Politicians, At The Same Time Allured And Terrified By The Glare Of Publicity....you Could Do Anything You Like With Them, If You Would Treat Them (even The Big Ones) Not As Wolves And Tigers, But As Domestic Animals By Nature, Even Though They Have Been Badly Brought Up And Not Trained As You Would Wish.

If Human Nature Felt No Temptation To Take A Chance There Might Not Be Much Investment Merely As A Result Of Cold Calculation.

The Expected Never Happens; It Is The Unexpected Always.

Economic Privation Proceeds By Easy Stages, And So Long As Men Suffer It Patiently The Outside World Cares Little.

The Important Thing For Government Is Not To Do Things Which Individuals Are Doing Already, And To Do Them A Little Better Or A Little Worse; But To Do Those Things Which At Present Are Not Done At All.

For My Own Part, I Believe That There Is Social And Psychological Justification For Significant Inequalities Of Incomes And Wealth.

It Is Ideas, Not Vested Interests, Which Are Dangerous For Good Or Evil.

The Classical Theorists Resemble Euclidean Geometers In A Non-euclidean World Who, Discovering That In Experience Straight Lines Apparently Parallel Often Meet, Rebuke The Lines For Not Keeping Straight As The Only Remedy For The Unfortunate Collisions Which Are Occurring. Yet, In Truth, There Is No Remedy Except To Throw Over The Axiom Of Parallels And To Work Out A Non-euclidean Geometry.

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The Principle Objectives In Life Are Love, The Creation And Enjoyment If Aesthetic Experience, The Pursuit Of Knowledge. Love Comes A Long Way First.

The Difficulty Lies, Not In The New Ideas, But In Escaping The Old Ones, Which Ramify, For Those Brought Up As Most Of Us Have Been, Into Every Corner Of Our Minds.

The Decadent International But Individualistic Capitalism In The Hands Of Which We Found Ourselves After The War Is Not A Success. It Is Not Intelligent. It Is Not Beautiful. It Is Not Just. It Is Not Virtuous. And It Doesn't Deliver The Goods.

An Investor Who Proposes To Ignore Near-term Market Fluctuations Needs Greater Resources For Safety And Must Not Operate On So Large A Scale, If At All, With Borrowed Money.

The Love Of Money As A Possession...will Be Recognised For What It Is, A Somewhat Disgusting Morbidity.

The Power To Become Habituated To His Surroundings Is A Marked Characteristic Of Mankind.

Characteristics

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If Economists Could Manage To Get Themselves Thought Of As Humble, Competent People On A Level With Dentists, That Would Be Splendid.

The Economic Problem...the Problem Of Want And Poverty And The Economic Struggle Between Classes And Nations, Is Nothing But A Frightful Muddle, A Transitory And Unnecessary Muddle.

Nothing Mattered Except States Of Mind, Chiefly Our Own.

It Is The Long Term Investor Who Will In Practice Come In For The Most Criticism. For It Is The Essence Of His Behaviour That He Should Be Eccentric, Unconventional And Rash In The Eyes Of The Average Opinion. If He Is Successful, That Will Only Confirm The General Belief In His Rashness; And If In The Short Run He Is Unsuccessful, Which Is Very Likely, He Will Not Receive Much Mercy. Worldly Wisdom Teaches That It Is Better For Reputation To Fail Conventionally Than To Succeed Unconventionally.

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Successful Investing Is Anticipating The Anticipations Of Others.

Thus, The Weight Of My Criticism Is Directed Against The Inadequacy Of The Theoretical Foundations Of The Laissez-faire Doctrine Upon Which I Was Brought Up And For Many Years I Taught

Once We Allow Ourselves To Be Disobedient To The Test Of An Accountant's Profit, We Have Begun To Change Our Civilization.

The Inhabitant Of London Could Order By Telephone, Sipping His Morning Tea In Bed, The Various Products Of The Whole Earth -- He Could At The Same Time And By The Same Means Adventure His Wealth In The Natural Resources And New Enterprise Of Any Quarter Of The World -- He Could Secure Forthwith, If He Wished, Cheap And Comfortable Means Of Transit To Any Country Or Climate Without Passport Or Other Formality.

The Duty Of "saving" Became Nine-tenths Of Virtue And The Growth Of The Cake The Object Of True Religion.

Americans Are Apt To Be Unduly Interested In Discovering What Average Opinion Believes Average Opinion To Be.

Like All His Type, Newton Was Wholly Aloof From Women.

Everything Is Always Decided For Reasons Other Than The Real Merits Of The Case

Conservatism Leads Nowhere; It Satisfies No Ideal.

God Has Arrived. I Met Him On The 5:15 Train.

The Numeric System Was Invented To Help Man To Put Order In The Chaos Of The World.

It Is Better To Be Roughly Right Than Precisely Wrong.

This Siren, This Goat-footed Bard, This Half Human Visitor To Our Age The Hag-ridden And Enchanted Woods Of Celtic Antiquity. One Catches In His Company That Flavour Of Final Purposelessness, Inner Responsibility, Existence Outside Or Away From Our Saxon Good And Evil, Mixed With Cunning, Remorselessness, Love Of Power.

It Is A Good Thing To Make Mistakes So Long As You're Found Out Quickly.

It Is Better That A Man Should Tyrannize Over His Bank Balance Than Over His Fellow-citizens.

Economics Is A Very Dangerous Science.

When My Information Changes, I Alter My Conclusions. What Do You Do, Sir?

It Is Enterprise Which Build And Improves The World's Possessions...if Enterprise Is Afoot, Wealth Accumulates Whatever May Be Happening To Thrift; And If Enterprise Is Asleep, Wealth Decays, Whatever Thrift May Be Doing.

Too Large A Proportion Of Recent "mathematical" Economics Are Mere Concoctions, As Imprecise As The Initial Assumptions They Rest On, Which Allow The Author To Lose Sight Of The Complexities And Interdependencies Of The Real World In A Maze Of Pretentious And Unhelpful Symbols.

Morally And Philosophically I Find Myself In Agreement With Virtually The Whole Of It: And Not Only In Agreement With It, But In Deeply Moved Agreement.

The Difficulty Lies, Not In The New Ideas, But In Escaping From The Old Ones.

Pyramid-building, Earthquakes, Even Wars May Serve To Increase Wealth, If The Education Of Our Statesmen On The Principles Of The Classical Economics Stands In The Way Of Anything Better.

Government Machinery Has Been Described As A Marvelous Labor Saving Device Which Enables Ten Men To Do The Work Of One.

Dangerous Acts Can Be Done Safely In A Community Which Thinks And Feels Rightly, Which Would Be The Way To Hell If They Were Executed By Those Who Think And Feel Wrongly.

I Do Not Mean To Impugn The Social Justice And Social Expediency Of The Redistribution Of Incomes Aimed At By N.i.r.a. And By The Various Schemes For Agricultural Restriction. The Latter, In Particular, I Should Strongly Support In Principle. But Too Much Emphasis On The Remedial Value Of A Higher Price-level As An Object In Itself May Lead To Serious Misapprehension As To The Part Which Prices Can Play In The Technique Of Recovery. The Stimulation Of Output By Increasing Aggregate Purchasing Power Is The Right Way To Get Prices Up; And Not The Other Way Round.

Perhaps A Day Might Come When There Would Be At Last Be Enough To Go Round, And When Posterity Could Enter Into The Enjoyment Of Our Labors.

I Don't Feel The Least Humble Before The Vastness Of The Heavens.

The Division Of The Spoils Between The Victors Will Also Provide Employment For A Powerful Office, Whose Doorsteps The Greedy Adventurers And Jealous Concession Hunters Of Twenty Or Thirty Nations Will Crowd And Defile.

The Biggest Problem Is Not To Let People Accept New Ideas, But To Let Them Forget The Old Ones.

Logic , Like Lyrical Poetry , Is No Employment For The Middle-aged

It Would Be Foolish, In Forming Our Expectations, To Attach Great Weight To Matters Which Are Very Uncertain.

It Is The Long-term Investor...who Will In Practice Come In For The Most Criticism... For It Is The Essence Of His Behavior That He Should Be Eccentric, Unconventional, And Rash In The Eyes Of Average Opinion

All The Political Parties Alike Have Their Origins In Past Ideas And Not In New Ideas And None More Conspicuously So Than The Marxists .

The Love Of Money As A Possession-as Distinguished From The Love Of Money As A Means To The Enjoyments And Realities Of Life-will Be Recognized For What It Is, A Somewhat Disgusting Morbidity, One Of Those Semi-criminal, Semi-pathological Propensities Which One Hands Over With A Shudder To The Specialists In Mental Disease

When Somebody Persuades Me I Am Wrong, I Change My Mind.

A Sound Banker, Alas, Is Not One Who Foresees Danger And Avoids It, But One Who, When He Is Ruined, Is Ruined In A Conventional And Orthodox Way Along With His Fellows, So That No One Can Really Blame Him. It Is Necessarily Part Of The Business Of A Banker To Maintain Appearances, And To Confess A Conventional Respectability, Which Is More Than Human. Life-long Practices Of This Kind Make Them The Most Romantic And The Least Realistic Of Men.

How Can I Adopt A Creed Which, Preferring The Mud To The Fish, Exalts The Boorish Proletariat Above The Bourgeois And The Intelligentsia Who, With Whatever Faults, Are The Quality In Life And Surely Carry The Seeds Of All Human Advancement?

Chess Is A Cure For Headaches.

Adam Smith And Malthus And Ricardo ! There Is Something About These Three Figures To Evoke More Than Ordinary Sentiments From Us Their Children In The Spirit.

Capitalism Is The Astounding Belief That The Most Wickedest Of Men Will Do The Most Wickedest Of Things For The Greatest Good Of Everyone.

I Find Myself More And More Relying For A Solution Of Our Problems On The Invisible Hand Which I Tried To Eject From Economic Thinking Twenty Years Ago.

Nevertheless, If We Contemplate A Society With A Somewhat Stable Wage-unit, With National Characteristics Which Determine The Propensity To Consume And The Preference For Liquidity, And With A Monetary System Which Rigidly Links The Quantity Of Money To The Stock Of The Precious Metals, It Will Be Essential For The Maintenance Of Prosperity That The Authorities Should Pay Close Attention To The State Of The Balance Of Trade. For A Favourable Balance, Provided It Is Not Too Large, Will Prove Extremely Stimulating; Whilst An Unfavourable Balance May Soon Produce A State Of Persistent Depression.

... A Speculator Is One Who Runs Risks Of Which He Is Aware And An Investor Is One Who Runs Risks Of Which He Is Unaware.

Capitalism Is The Extraordinary Belief That The Nastiest Of Men, For The Nastiest Of Reasons, Will Somehow Work For The Benefit Of Us All.

There Is No Subtler, No Surer Means Of Overturning The Existing Basis Of Society Than To Debauch The Currency.

Investment Based On Genuine Long-term Expectations Is So Difficult Today As To Be Scarcely Practicable.

The Central Principle Of Investment Is To Go Contrary To The General Opinion, On The Grounds That If Everyone Agreed About Its Merits, The Investment Is Inevitably Too Dear And Therefore Unattractive.

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.

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.

There Is No Harm In Being Sometimes Wrong - Especially If One Is Promptly Found Out.

Experience Shows That What Happens Is Always The Thing Against Which One Has Not Made Provision In Advance.

By This Means (fractional Reserve Banking) Government May Secretly And Unobserved, Confiscate The Wealth Of The People, And Not One Man In A Million Will Detect The Theft.

If We Consistently Act On The Optimistic Hypothesis, This Hypothesis Will Tend To Be Realised; Whilst By Acting On The Pessimistic Hypothesis We Can Keep Ourselves For Ever In The Pit Of Want.

Education: The Inculcation Of The Incomprehensible Into The Indifferent By The Incompetent.

Perhaps It Is Historically True That No Order Of Society Ever Perishes Save By Its Own Hand.

...by Combining A Popular Hatred Of The Class Of Entrepreneurs With The Blow Already Given To Social Security By The Violent And Arbitrary Disturbance Of Contract,... Governments Are Fast Rendering Impossible A Continuance Of The Social And Economic Order Of The Nineteenth Century.

It Is Preferable To Regard Labour, Including, Of Course, The Personal Services Of The Entrepreneur, And His Assistants, As The Sole Factor Of Production, Operating In A Given Environment Of Technique, Natural Resources, Capital Equipment And Effective Demand. This Is Why We Have Been Able To Take Labour As The Sole Physical Unit Which We Require In Our Economic System, Apart From Units Of Money And Of Time.

Well, When I Get New Information, I Rethink My Position. What, Sir, Do You Do With New Information?

The Immense Accumulations Of Fixed Capital Which, To The Great Benefit Of Mankind, Were Built Up During The Half Century Before The War, Could Never Have Come About In A Society Where Wealth Was Divided Equitably.

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.

I Feel No Shame At Being Found Still Owning A Share When The Bottom Of The Market Comes…i Would Go Much Further Than That. I Should Say That It Is From Time To Time The Duty Of A Serious Investor To Accept The Depreciation Of His Holdings With Equanimity And Without Reproaching Himself. … An Investor…should Be Aiming Primarily At Long-period Results, And Should Be Solely Judged By These.

When I Find New Information I Change My Mind; What Do You Do?

New Information

If We Aim Deliberately At The Impoverishment Of Central Europe, Vengeance, I Dare Predict, Will Not Limp.

I Believe That The Future Will Learn More From The Spirit Of Gesell Than From That Of Marx .

Canada Is A Place Of Infinite Promise. We Like The People, And If One Ever Had To Emigrate, This Would Be The Destination, Not The U.s.a. The Hills, Lakes And Forests Make It A Place Of Peace And Repose Of The Mind, Such As One Never Finds In The U.s.a.

All Production Is For The Purpose Of Ultimately Satisfying A Consumer.

What An Extraordinary Episode In The Economic Progress Of Man That Age Was Which Came To An End In August, 1914!

They Offer Me Neither Food Nor Drink - Intellectual Nor Spiritual Consolation... [conservatism] Leads Nowhere; It Satisfies No Ideal; It Conforms To No Intellectual Standard, It Is Not Safe, Or Calculated To Preserve From The Spoilers That Degree Of Civilization Which We Have Already Attained.

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