The Price of Peace Quotes

“As Keynes explained his own methods in The General Theory: “The object of our analysis is, not to provide a machine, or method of blind manipulation, which will furnish an infallible answer, but to provide ourselves with an organised and orderly method of thinking out particular problems….Too large a proportion of recent ‘mathematical’ economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.”8”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“Prosperity is not hard-wired into human beings; it must be orchestrated and sustained by political leadership.”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“Classical economics saw money as something static, like a painting. Keynes saw it as creating narratives of economic possibility, more like a film or a novel. “The importance of money essentially flows from its being a link between the present and the future.”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“It was not the power of Keynes’ argument that propelled the book to such wild success. It was the vicious, detailed personal portraits of the Great Men he lambasted.”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“Prior to The General Theory, economics was almost exclusively concerned with scarcity and efficiency. The very word for the productive output of society—economy—was a metaphor for making do with less. The root cause of human suffering was understood to be a shortage of resources to meet human needs. Social reformers might protest the extravagances of the rich, but poverty and squalor were driven not”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“Keynes was not only inventing modern economics, he was helping invent the modern economist and placing him at the apex of a new intellectual power structure.”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive ‘natural liberty’ in their economic activities,” Keynes wrote. “There is no ‘compact’ conferring perpetual rights on those who Have or on those who Acquire. The world is not so governed from above that private and social interests always coincide. It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest.”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“Keynesianism in this purest, simplest form is not so much a school of economic thought as a spirit of radical optimism, unjustified by most of human history and extremely difficult to conjure up precisely when it is most needed: during the depths of a depression or amid the fevers of war.

Yet such optimism is a vital and necessary element of everyday life. It is the spirit that propels us to go on living in the face of unavoidable suffering, that compels us to fall in love when our hearts have been broken, and that gives us the courage to bring children into the world, believing that even in times such as these we are surrounded by enough beauty to fill lifetime after lifetime.”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“The Great Society’s civil rights agenda did help spread the gains of the roaring economy more equally. The black poverty rate dropped to 32.2 percent, a dramatic improvement from the rate of 55 percent that had prevailed when Galbraith had published The Affluent Society. But the statistical chasm between black and white poverty remained an unresolved crisis in American democracy. The black poverty rate would not drop below 30 percent until 1995. It is 21.8 percent today, compared to 8.8 percent among white households.”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“intuition had to be grounded in lived experience.”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“Artistically it is a failure,” Keynes conceded. “I have changed my mind too much during the course of writing it for it to be a proper unity.”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice, and individual liberty,”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“bailouts of 2008 and 2009 saved the global financial system. But they did not save the American middle class.”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“rise of the Nazis posed other problems for Keynes’ worldview. In his letters to Lydia, Keynes at times used “Jewish” and “circumcised” as synonyms for “greedy.” The economist Robert Solow has even suggested that Keynes’ attacks on “love of money” in “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” reflect a “polite anti-semitism.”20 Solow presses his case too far, but Keynes’ jokes with Lydia do represent more than some unfortunate, outdated terminology. In 1926, he had written a brief sketch of Albert Einstein, one of his intellectual heroes, after meeting him in Berlin. Einstein, according to Keynes, was one of the good Jews—“a sweet imp” who had “not sublimated immortality into compound interest.” Keynes knew many such good Jews in Germany. There was a Berlin banker named Fuerstenberg “who Lydia liked so much” and the “mystical” German economist Kurt Singer and even his “dear” friend Carl Melchior, whom he had met at the Paris Peace Conference. “Yet if I lived there, I felt I might turn anti-Semite. For the poor Prussian is too slow and heavy on his legs for the other kind of Jews, the ones who are not imps but serving devils, with small horns, pitch forks, and oily tails. It is not agreeable to see a civilisation so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all the money and the power and the brains.”21 The sketch was rancid even by the standards of his own time. Keynes may have realized it. The piece was not published until after his death. After the Nazis came to power, Keynes became more considerate with his vocabulary. In August”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“rise of the Nazis posed other problems for Keynes’ worldview. In his letters to Lydia, Keynes at times used “Jewish” and “circumcised” as synonyms for “greedy.” The economist Robert Solow has even suggested that Keynes’ attacks on “love of money” in “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” reflect a “polite anti-semitism.”20 Solow presses his case too far, but Keynes’ jokes with Lydia do represent more than some unfortunate, outdated terminology. In 1926, he had written a brief sketch of Albert Einstein, one of his intellectual heroes, after meeting him in Berlin. Einstein, according to Keynes, was one of the good Jews—“a sweet imp” who had “not sublimated immortality into compound interest.” Keynes knew many such good Jews in Germany. There was a Berlin banker named Fuerstenberg “who Lydia liked so much” and the “mystical” German economist Kurt Singer and even his “dear” friend Carl Melchior, whom he had met at the Paris Peace Conference. “Yet if I lived there, I felt I might turn anti-Semite. For the poor Prussian is too slow and heavy on his legs for the other kind of Jews, the ones who are not imps but serving devils, with small horns, pitch forks, and oily tails. It is not agreeable to see a civilisation so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all the money and the power and the brains.”21 The sketch was rancid even by the standards of his own time. Keynes may have realized it. The piece was not published until after his death. After the Nazis came to power, Keynes became more considerate”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“Wars, Keynes argued, were fading from history; serious twentieth-century intellectuals like the Woolfs should concern themselves with weightier matters.”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.”43”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“Keynes’ analysis of the investment process thus paralleled his understanding of democracy. Uncertainty about the future—not irrationality or stupidity—makes crowds prone to calamity in both finance and politics, particularly under conditions of significant anxiety. Markets are no more self-correcting than a mob hailing a demagogue. To work at all, they must be structured, guided, and managed. They might even have to be replaced. In A Treatise on Money, Keynes had argued that money was inherently political—the creation of the state. He was now extending that observation to markets themselves.”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“In Reagan’s first year in office, he ran a $79 billion deficit—more than double Nixon’s gambit from 1971, even adjusted for inflation. By 1986, the deficit was over $221 billion. Government spending remained well over 20 percent of GDP in every year of Reagan’s presidency—higher than in Johnson’s tenure and more than double the rate during the prewar New Deal years under FDR.”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“He heard them crying the news in the street. And shrugging his shoulders applied himself to the great green board on which were pinned sheets of symbols: a frolic of xs controlled by ys and embraced by more cryptic symbols still: which, if juggled together would eventually, he was sure, positive, produce the one word, the simple, the sufficient the comprehensive word which will solve all problems forever. It was time to begin. He began.”26”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“was a rhetorically deft presentation, delivered by a master storyteller. But there were problems with the story. Keynes himself had predicted a postwar boom, not a depression (so had Galbraith, in “194Q”). He had never claimed that monetary policy didn’t matter. He had opposed using high interest rates as a policy device because they were the most socially destructive method available for bringing down prices. He never claimed it didn’t work. And although it was true that Keynes had”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“The real struggle of today…is between that view of the world, termed liberalism or radicalism, for which the primary object of government and of foreign policy is peace, freedom of trade and intercourse, and economic wealth, and that other view, militarist, or, rather, diplomatic, which thinks in terms of power, prestige, national or personal glory, the imposition of a culture, and hereditary or racial prejudice.”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“American Capitalism had celebrated the end of scarcity. Now The Affluent Society decried the country’s increasing dependence on unnecessary production to establish the financial security of most families.”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“In much of Europe, shorter workweeks are an explicit and uncontroversial public policy goal. Germans, for instance, work an average of twenty-six hours a week when vacation time is averaged out over the year.18”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“The economic fuel for the rise of Hitler had been the suffering and despair generated by deflation—not the social welfare policies Hayek decried as “socialism”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“By 2008, the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has noted, global economic output reached a level sufficient to raise every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth above the U.S. poverty line—a very great improvement for the domestic poor and an astounding achievement for the global poor.”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“Both of the two opposed errors of pessimism which now make so much noise in the world will be proved wrong in our own time,” he told readers of The Nation, “the pessimism of the revolutionaries who think that things are so bad that nothing can save us but violent change, and the pessimism of the reactionaries who consider the balance of our economic and social life so precarious that we must risk no experiments.”71”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

“The real struggle of today…is between that view of the world, termed liberalism or radicalism, for which the primary object of government and of foreign policy is peace, freedom of trade and intercourse, and economic wealth, and that other view, militarist, or, rather, diplomatic, which thinks in terms of power, prestige, national or personal glory, the imposition of a culture, and hereditary or racial prejudice.” If”
― Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes