Saturday, May 04, 2013

The General Theory of the Future


Wading into the Niall Ferguson controversy (with Ferguson himself already having conceded defeat), Jonah Goldberg finds an old Gertrude Himmelfarb quote --

There is a discernible affinity between the Bloomsbury ethos, which put a premium on immediate and present satisfactions, and Keynesian economics, which is based entirely on the short run and precludes any long-term judgments. (Keynes’s famous remark. “In the long run we are all dead,” also has an obvious connection with his homosexuality — what Schumpeter delicately referred to as his “childless vision.”)

Above, part of the table of contents of Keynes 1930 book, Essays in Persuasion.