Comment by throw0101a
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.
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.