Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The trouble with Keynes is that it's only fully true on the time scale of the heat death of the universe, and in that context it's fully nihilistic. Whereas most economic theories do operate on timescales where the finding out comes within the lifetime of the people fucking around You got this completely backwards: Keynes argument is that economic policies cannot just rely on the fact that things are going to be fi…
No, the quote is regularly brought out as a justification to ignore long-term and even medium-term effects whenever the result is anything less than instantaneous. Even right now we're in a discussion about manufacturing where the lead time is a low single digit number of years. The expectation that we'll all be dead before it shakes out is rather implausible but there is the quote. And there are no valid theories th…
If the quotation is misused that is hardly the fault of Keynes:
> The Tract is the source of Keynes's famous remark, "in the long run we are all dead." This occurs in the context of noting that price level should vary in direct proportion to money quantity if other variables return to their former values, but the short-term dynamics of this process have practical importance.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tract_on_Monetary_Reform#Leg...
The economic pain that Britain was experiencing in the 1920s due to its ill-conceived idea of sticking with the Gold Standard, especially at the wrong level, could have been solved through policy tools that the Bank of England had at the time rather than waiting for this to stabilize 'in the long-run'. I.e., he did not want to wait for eventual stabilization, he wanted to alleviate people's suffering now: it's no use to you if things stabilize when you're dead.
A longer extract:
> 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.