Quote

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.

John Maynard Keynes

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John Maynard Keynes
Age: 62 †
Born: 1883
Born: June 5
Died: 1946
Died: April 21
Businessperson
Diplomat
Economist
Mathematician
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Politician
Professor
Lord Keynes
Baron Keynes of Tilton
Nothing
Unnecessary
Classes
Poverty
Struggle
Economic
Class
Frightful
Nations
Muddle
Problem
Transitory

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Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits-a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.
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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
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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.
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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. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exulted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the highest virtues.
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Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.
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Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole.
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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
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I think that Capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself is in many ways extremely objectionable.
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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?
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The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.
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By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.
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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.
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Ideas shape the course of history.
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Once doubt begins it spreads rapidly.
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I don't feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens.
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For my own part, I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth.
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There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.
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If human nature felt no temptation to take a chance there might not be much investment merely as a result of cold calculation.
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The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.
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Galton's eccentric, sceptical, observing, flashing, cavalry-leader type of mind led him eventually to become the founder of the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists, namely eugenics.
John Maynard Keynes