Comment by AnthonyMouse
9 days ago
No, the quote is regularly brought out as a justification to ignore long-term and even medium-term effects whenever the result is anything less than instantaneous. Even right now we're in a discussion about manufacturing where the lead time is a low single digit number of years. The expectation that we'll all be dead before it shakes out is rather implausible but there is the quote.
And there are no valid theories that are only true if you wait until the heat death of the universe, because by then everyone is dead and there is no one to constitute an economy. There are, however, many theories that could be valid even though they take decades or more to shake out, and that quote is used especially against those to rationalize exactly the short-term thinking that lets people ignore that even when they are dead, we, i.e. humanity and its future generations, will be holding the long-term consequences of whatever we choose to do right now.
> No, the quote is regularly brought out as a justification to ignore long-term and even medium-term effects whenever the result is anything less than instantaneous.
If the quotation is misused that is hardly the fault of Keynes:
> The Tract is the source of Keynes's famous remark, "in the long run we are all dead." This occurs in the context of noting that price level should vary in direct proportion to money quantity if other variables return to their former values, but the short-term dynamics of this process have practical importance.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tract_on_Monetary_Reform#Leg...
The economic pain that Britain was experiencing in the 1920s due to its ill-conceived idea of sticking with the Gold Standard, especially at the wrong level, could have been solved through policy tools that the Bank of England had at the time rather than waiting for this to stabilize 'in the long-run'. I.e., he did not want to wait for eventual stabilization, he wanted to alleviate people's suffering now: it's no use to you if things stabilize when you're dead.
A longer extract:
> In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
It is his fault, because he favored statements that go too far. "In the long run we are all dead" is so widely abused exactly because it's phrased in a way that allows it to be set against anything that takes time, even the things worth doing. It thereby sounds more authoritative than it has any right to be because it's so often the wrong conclusion.
This is the same guy who said it's better to give people jobs digging holes and filling them back in than to have them be unemployed, thereby giving every fool with a bad plan cover to ignore the false dichotomy and thereby the opportunity costs of doing something wasteful instead of something more efficient or productive.
Looking out ten years is an easy answer but that doesn't make it a wrong answer. I didn't choose the time period, the person calling this the slow death of personal computing did. And these computer prices are life and death for extremely few people.
I don't think the quote is particularly on point in this discussion, but that doesn't make your understanding of Keynes correct (and your misunderstanding doesn't make much sense in the context of this particular discussion either).
And I tend to agree with /u/bayindirh that the original optimism of /u/Dylan16807 is baseless. We don't know have things will turn out, but it's absolutely not guaranteed that we'll ever return to “normal” (“normal” being what happened in a very narrow time period where computing power was so cheap it was available for the masses to own).
> I don't think the quote is particularly on point in this discussion, but that doesn't make your understanding of Keynes correct (and your misunderstanding doesn't make much sense in the context of this particular discussion either).
It isn't a misunderstanding. Even in the original context, the proposal is to be impatient with something that takes time even if it eventually works. (It's also not even the best critique of the gold standard, which has plenty of problems not solved no matter how long you wait.) Worse, the quip has memetic fitness (people think it sounds edgy) even though it expresses no limiting principle and can thereby be used in service of every incitement to do something stupid immediately because the smarter thing takes a minute.
It's sometimes true that acting quickly is the better option, but by giving no indication as to which times that is, it's an ambiguous statement masquerading as a conclusive determination and an invitation to do the wrong thing in the common case.
Very narrow? The masses could get a computer for almost all the time integrated circuits have been produced.
And the entire time, better manufacturing pushed prices down at least every few years. Including RAM going up multiple times. We would have to buck that entire trend on top of having a failure of supply and demand to end up with the current prices being permanent.
(And don't be dramatic. Even at current prices, computers are available for the masses.)
> Very narrow? The masses could get a computer for almost all the time integrated circuits have been produced.
The “personal computing for the mass” era hadn't even started when I was born, and I don't even consider myself old yet.
> And the entire time, better manufacturing pushed prices down at least every few years.
It's not because something happened before that it will necessarily happen again.
> Even at current prices, computers are available for the masses.
Computers are still available, but for the first time they are significantly less affordable than just a year ago. And nobody's saying the personal computer era is over yet, we're arguing that it's a possibility in the near future, and you won't convince me otherwise by saying “but it has always been like that” because it's not how it works, and because I'm just old enough to know it hasn't.
The “personal computer” has already been mostly replaced by locked-in terminals in the general public, so it's not like this worry is coming out of nowhere.
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