In The Long Run We Are

This is one of Keynes's most quoted lines, drawn from A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), where he criticized economists who argued that markets would self-correct over time. The full passage reads: "But 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 remark was a polemical defense of active economic policy during downturns, not a counsel of nihilism.