Sublime

In sum, businessmen were misled by bank credit inflation to invest too much in higher-order capital goods, which could only be prosperously sustained through lower time preferences and greater savings and investment;

John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction: within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week. The challenge would be how to fill all our new-found leisure time without going crazy. ‘For the first time since his creation,’ Keynes told his audience, ‘man w

Milton Friedman, the economist, once wrote, “The best measure of quality thinking is your ability to accurately predict the consequences of your ideas and subsequent actions.” His point was that economic theory divorced from what actually happened when that theory was applied was clearly incorrect.

fiscal stimulus was out of the question. This ‘asset-price Keynesianism’ offered an alternative way to get the economy growing in the absence of deficit spending and competitive manufacturing.

The prime exponent of Buddhist economics, E. F. Schumacher, was a colleague of John Maynard Keynes who, after long reflection on the theories that he once practiced, wrote a popular exposition of a more sustainable economics in Small Is Beautiful.

Some influential economists, led by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, claimed this was an important step forward, a demonstration that economics had become a value-free zone, shaking off any normative claims of what ought to be and emerging at last as a ‘positive’ science focused on describing simply what is. But this created a vacuum of goal

Keynes was a failed investor and statistician who never studied economics but was so well‐connected with the ruling class in Britain that the embarrassing drivel he wrote in his most famous book, The General Theory of Employment, Money, and Interest, was immediately elevated into the status of founding truths of macroeconomics. His theory begins wi

What Keynes was reporting is that the human mind works a lot like the human egg. When one sperm gets into a human egg, there’s an automatic shut-off device that bars any other sperm from getting in. The human mind tends strongly toward the same sort of result. And so, people tend to accumulate large mental holdings of fixed conclusions and attitude

As an economy advances and becomes increasingly sophisticated, the connection between physical capital and the loanable funds market does not change in reality, but it does get obfuscated in the minds of people.