As Frank Knight observed fifteen years before Keynes published The General Theory, “At the bottom of the uncertainty problem in economics is the forward-looking character of the economic process itself.”30 Because the economic environment is constantly changing, all economic data are specific to their own time period. Consequently they provide only a frail basis for generalizations. Real time matters more than time in the abstract, and samples drawn from the past have little relevance. What was 75% probable yesterday has an unknown probability tomorrow. A system that cannot rely on the
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