John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, CB, FBA, was an English economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and is widely considered to be one of the most influential economists of the 20th century and the founder of modern macroeconomics. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics and its...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth5 June 1883
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
When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.
Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.
There is no harm in being sometimes wrong - especially if one is promptly found out.
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.
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 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.
Should government refrain from regulation (taxation), the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent and the fraud can no longer be concealed.
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.
The time has already come when each country needs a considered national policy about what size of population, whether larger or smaller than at present or the same, is most expedient. And having settled this policy, we must take steps to carry it into operation. The time may arrive a little later when the community as a whole must pay attention to the innate quality as well as to the mere numbers of its future members.
Chess is a cure for headaches.
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.
The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.