Epstein Secrets

vailable for business to borrow and invest. But business lacked the “animal spirits” to take such a risk ina slump. We saw the same story after 2008. Keynes’ proposal was for government to do the borrowing and investing instead. That’s part of the “fiscal policy” I described in Chapter 1. Here we tend to

saving is invested, as I use the word, but finds different returns. Saving under the mattress is investment at zero return, and drops output just as Keynes said. Investment at the current average return keeps output unchanged. That’s what Keynes meant. But investment at lower returns lowers output, and c

n the Neutral Zone in 1953. The Emir’s identical house was a few steps away. My father’s favorite maple sugar was still in the fridge. I read the few Shakespeare plays | hadn’t read in college, and read or reread the complete poems and plays of John Keats. The house arrest was probably as much dressing-down

d their market value in return, as if on the books of a firm. Chapter 6: Parallels with the Firm 2/4/16 21 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011055 Marshall’s pupil Keynes was thoroughly a marginalist, as are economists in general today and as am I. One of the features of his General Theory of 1936 was a kind of double-

t the human capital of children. But Farr deserves credit for pointing out that human capital in general capitalizes pay less invested consumption. Keynes’ teacher Alfred Marshall agreed with Farr in 1990’. As I read this passage, Marshall interpreted maintenance consumption as investment. So did B. F.

rates were well within the range of modern rates and the lowest were far below modern rates in periods of credit stringency.” Merchants of Venice in Shakespeare’s time and long before borrowed from banks, not from Shylocks, and at rather lower cost than merchants of the twentieth century. Economics and Biol

ht also be surprised at my choice of benchmarks in verse and economics. Masefield and Mill? A consensus might have picked T. S. Elliot, say, and Lord Keynes. Masefield and Mill are likelier to be remembered as old-fashioned fuddy-duddies already outmoded when they wrote. But that’s me. I am Don Quixote. N

b paragraph on growth. The candidates for third seem well behind. Maybe Jevons or John Rae or Leon Walras. Time has not been kind to the teachings of Keynes. I would now rank his teacher Alfred Marshall higher. I like Myrdal’s magnificent ex ante - ex post distinction. Boehm Bawerk and the Austrian school

ound a clear choice for third. There are awesome things in Milton, Blake, Coleridge, Tennyson, Emily, Houseman, Robinson, Dowson, Yeats and others. Shakespeare, like Mozart, doesn’t figure in the center of the picture. I take him as the greatest mind and soul yet known, the greatest playwright, the greatest

tire world was pulled into the fire. “In the autumn of 1919, in which I write, we are at the dead season of our fortunes,” the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote after the Paris Peace Conference settled The Great War, dimly aware that an even deader season lay somewhere in the future in the form of anoth

lague, strangled as heretical, burnt up in a library fire, or dissolved by some military misfortune. This is why, for instance, we have almost all of Shakespeare and why we are missing so much of Sappho. Widespread knowledge changed this. A solid, inarguable base endured. “If 1 have seen further,” Newton famou

ods is largely automated, as are many services. What’s left for humans to do? In 1930—long before the advent of computers, let alone AI—John Maynard Keynes wrote, in an essay called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” that as a result of improvements in productivity, society could produce all

ommunity, must say something substantially different from the community’s previous common stock of information.” This was why “schoolboys do not like Shakespeare,” he concluded: The Bard’s couplets may depart starkly from random bitstreams, but they had nonetheless become all too familiar to the sense-making p

ods is largely automated, as are many services. What’s left for humans to do? In 1930—long before the advent of computers, let alone AI—John Maynard Keynes wrote, in an essay called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” that as a result of improvements in productivity, society could produce all

ommunity, must say something substantially different from the community’s previous common stock of information.” This was why “schoolboys do not like Shakespeare,” he concluded: The Bard’s couplets may depart starkly from random bitstreams, but they had nonetheless become all too familiar to the sense-making p