This morning I was grazing through [amazon_link id=”B000UWHGDM” target=”_blank” ]The New Economics: Keynes’ Influence on Theory and Public Policy[/amazon_link] edited by Seymour Harris, a collection of essays published shortly after Keynes’s death giving an early evaluation of the great man’s influence.

[amazon_image id=”B0012UV96Q” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The new economics ~ Keynes’ influence on theory and public policy[/amazon_image]

The biographical essay by Joseph Schumpeter has this marvellous line:

“He had no taste for politics, but he had less than no taste for patient routine work and for breaking in, by gentle arts, that refractory wild beast, the politician.”

(I also like Schumpeter’s further description of him as: “A formidable controversialist whom nobody could overlook, everybody respected, and some liked.”)

By coincidence, I used a Keynes quotation recently in a presentation myself:

“There is nothing a government hates more than to be well-informed; for it makes the process of arriving at decisions much more complicated and difficult.”

No doubt he would have hated our present combination of electoral uncertainty and social media hyperbole.