The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.
Interpretation
Skilled investment aims to counteract the negative impacts of time and ignorance on our future prosperity.
John Maynard Keynes emphasizes the importance of skilled investment in safeguarding the future against the detrimental effects of time and ignorance. He suggests that the act of investing wisely is not merely a financial task; rather, it serves a greater social purpose by enabling progress and mitigating risks that threaten our collective advancements.
In practice
In a talk about sustainable investing, one might quote Keynes to illustrate the importance of forward-thinking investment strategies.
As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method of investment is to put fairly large sums into enterprises which one thinks one knows something about and in the management of which one thoroughly believes.
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.
The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.
We will not have any more crashes in our time.
This 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 long past the ocean is flat again.
The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45 [Hayek provided historical background up to page 45; after that came his theoretical model], and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.
My premise is not to tax to destroy the wealth of the wealthy; it's to increase the wealth of the bottom and the middle class.
If we want corporations to act differently, we have to force them to do so through laws that are fully enforced and through penalties higher than the economic benefits of thwarting the laws.
Let's not only provide a jumpstart to the economy and immediately or save 3 million jobs, but let's also put a down payment on some of the structural problems that we have in our economy.
If I care about poverty, I have to care a lot about investments in the private sector. The private sector creates the vast majority of jobs in the world, and social protection only goes so far.
In reality there is no such thing as an inflation of prices, relatively to gold. There is such a thing as a depreciated paper currency.
That's the problem with very high taxes - they don't redistribute wealth; they redistribute people.
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