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Quote by Richard Davenport-Hines

Work

Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

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Author

Richard Davenport-Hines
Richard Davenport-Hines

Richard Davenport-Hines, born on June 21, 1953, is a distinguished British biographer. His works primarily focus on historical figures and events, known for their in-depth research and vivid narrative. more

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“The war has ended with every one owing every one else immense sums of money. Germany owes a large sum to the Allies, the Allies owe a large sum to Great Britain, and Great Britain owes a large sum to the United States. The holders of war loan in every country are owed a large sum by the States, and the States in its turn is owed a large sum by these and other taxpayers. The whole position is in the highest degree artificial, misleading, and vexatious. We shall never be able to move again, unless we can free our limbs from these paper shackles.”

PeaceEconomicsWorld War IKeynes
Book:The Economic Consequences of the Peace
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“Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid", whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy.”

EconomyCostLegacyEnterpriseKeynes
Book:Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes
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“Keynes concluded that citizens both rich and poor would have to be led gradually out of capitalism, a base and repugnant system of morals. His fellow liberals in the 1920s debated the morality and efficacy of capitalism, as well as the correctness of the view that, as one Liberal politician put it, “man’s primary concern is to satisfy in ever ampler degree his physical needs.” For Keynes, this might be human nature, but his entanglement with Bateson and Pearson had immersed him in the notion that biological nature was malleable. Greed would be driven out not just by education but by the eugenic cultivation of “special talents.” It would be replaced by “some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue—that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow.” In the meantime, however, Keynes conceded capitalism’s efficacy. In order to improve productivity to the point where everyone’s needs could be easily satisfied, the coming century still demanded devotion to the god of greed. The goal of the next hundred years of capitalism would be its own extirpation.”

CapitalismPopulationBiologyProbabilityEugenicsKeynes
Author:David Roth Singerman
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