Meandering about . . .

A Happy Birthday salute to Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, both reknown economists.

Adam Smith (OS:June 5, 1723 [baptised 16 June 1723] – July 17, - 1790), is best known for An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations or simply The Wealth of Nations (1776), which is considered his magnus opus.

"All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. " - Adam Smith

"What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconvenience to the whole. No society can be flourishing and happy if the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. " - Adam Smith

“Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.” - Adam Smith

“The mind is so rarely disturbed, but that the company of friend will restore it to some degree of tranquility and sedateness.” - Adam Smith

“Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse.” - Adam Smith

"All money is a matter of belief." - Adam Smith

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John Maynard Keynes (June 5, 1883 – April 21, 1946), is best known for The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), which is considered his magnus opus. The ideas presented in this 1936 work formed the basis of what would be the Keynesian Theory.

John Maynard Keynes laid the foundation for the branch of economics referred to as Macroeconomics.

"When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease ... But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight." - John Maynard Keynes

"The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. 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 past the ocean is flat again." - John Maynard Keynes

"The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems — the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion." - John Maynard Keynes

"The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future." - John Maynard Keynes

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