Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Richard Davenport-Hines

Quote by Richard Davenport-Hines

“He never sat an examination in economics: his knowledge came from pondering problems and discussing them as much as from book-learning.”

Quote by Richard Davenport-Hines

Create image

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

You May Also Like

“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
Create image

“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
Create image

“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
Create image

“Sometime in the early 1920s, Keynes outlined a book he planned to call “Essays on the Economic Future of the World” (figure 3).101 The chapter titles mostly represent the issues—inequality, agricultural prices, the singular circumstances of the nineteenth century—that occupied him throughout the decade, and whose resolution constituted his various versions of the Liberal platform. Population, the third chapter, was always at the top of his agendas for the next Liberal government. The concluding chapter, however, is the more enigmatic “Education, Eugenics and Φυσει δουλοι.” Keynes took the phrase “Φυσει δουλοι” (phusei douloi), “slaves by nature,” from the first book of Aristotle’s Politics. It is with the qualities of human beings that Aristotle begins: “One that can foresee with his mind is naturally ruler and naturally master, and one that can [work] with his body is subject and naturally a slave.” For Aristotle, an enlightened polity recognizes that these two kinds of people are bound by their mutual interest, and social stability requires that both embrace their natural and symbiotic relationship. Keynes, envisioning a new kind of relationship between state and citizen, had in mind a similar symbiosis, but one in which the eugenic cultivation of talent might reshape rather than harden existing social strata.”

PoliticsQualityQuantityEugenicsKeynesAristotle
Author:David Roth Singerman
Create image