Keynes The Optimist

Keynes, I think before he said that in the long term we're all dead, in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, a short paper presented before students of, according to Bob Solow, a less-snotty-than-Eton public school, Winchester, wrote:

We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism. It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress which characterised the nineteenth cen­tury is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going to slow down ‑-at any rate in Great Britain; that a decline in prosperity is more likely than an improve­ment in the decade which lies ahead of us.

I believe that this is a wildly mistaken inter­pretation of what is happening to us. We are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing‑pains of over‑rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one economic period and another

I think this is relevant to current world economic affair, as well as to Indonesia.