… is from page 7 of George Stigler‘s 1950 book, Five Lectures on Economic Problems:
Keynes’s low estimate of investment outlets is already palpably unrealistic for the non-American world, and I do not think it is less so in the American situation. Of all economists, Lord Keynes was most sensitive to the conditions of the next moment – he was a Geiger counter of future headlines.
Indeed. J.M. Keynes reversed the hard-won progress of economic science by turning his brilliance – and the analytical prowess of legions of economists who fell under his sway – toward adorning in questionable scientific garb the ages-old errors and superstitions of the man-in-the-street who is blind to economic consequences beyond those that are most immediate and (hence) obvious even to a child. These Keynesian efforts gave credentials and apparent justification to government policies that promise to improve the here and now; these Keynesian efforts assured the man-in-the-street, and his office-greedy representatives in government, that they are justified in following their economically untutored instincts to dismiss the warnings of those economists of old to beware of consequences distant and unseen.
