John Maynard Keynes Quotes
It is not sufficient that the state of affairs which we seek to promote should be better than the state of affairs which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better to make up for the evils of the transition.
Although most consider Keynes a liberal, in many areas he was very conservative, and this is one. He opposed change and reform unless the degree of benefit would be very large. He is one of the few reformers who appreciated that there was a cost to society for making any change in that people are discomforted by change, and then there is the potential “evil” of the unintended consequences of the transition period.
John Maynard Keynes, 1883-1946, British Economist, Quoted in Robert Skidelsky, “True, Keynes cared little about the long run. But that wasn’t because he was gay”, The Washington Post, May 12, 2013
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1st Baron Macaulay. See {620691} for a related idea.
Many conservatives of the 19th Century honestly believed that for a well-grounded man, it was impossible to make a radical moral or cultural change. Froude thought that it was but should be done very carefully and sparingly. See {636915}.
This is the ultimate extreme of conservatism which literally means to conserve what is. Salisbury argues that even if you truly believe that the status quo is bad, you should keep it as the risk of change and unexpected consequence is so great that it is not worth the risk. Interestingly, this is the same mode of thinking which created the command in the Koran for Muslims to live with a terrible Caliph or ruler (unless he is a blasphemer or heretic) rather than risk the instability of regime change. See {590195} and {593076} as examples.
“Manumitting” means the freeing of slaves. See Quotation 643600 for Laurens’ view of slavery despite the fact that he was a substantial slave owner. He was willing to lose the money represented by the value of his slaves, but most slave owners self interest was to the contrary. One of the most interesting thing about this quotation is the fact that Laurens received so much opposition from his fellow South Carolinians and other Southerners despite the fact that only Laurens would lost money by freeing his slaves. Even slave owners who wanted to do the right thing and were willing to lost the money were under enormous social and political pressure not to free slaves.
John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, CB, FBA (5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946), was an English economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in mathematics, he built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles. One of the most influential economists of the 20th century, he produced writings that are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots. His ideas, reformulated as New Keynesianism, are fundamental to mainstream macroeconomics.
