Edmund Burke to Niall Ferguson: You know nothing of my work. You mean my whole theory is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.

Also noteworthy about that Burke quote is that it is more sanguine about the accumulation of public debt than Fergie has been.

I should probably add that Mr. Ferguson’s first name infuriates me. But surely his name rhymes with “trial”, and the wire brush and Domestos will be enough to keep my hands clean…

He probably managed to be less of a complete crank than Hans-Hermann Hoppe:

In March of 2004, during a 75-minute lecture in my Money and Banking class on time preference, interest, and capital, I presented numerous examples designed to illustrate the concept of time preference (or in the terminology of the sociologist Edward Banfield of “present- and future-orientation”). As one brief example, I referred to homosexuals as a group which, because they typically do not have children, tend to have a higher degree of time preference and are more present-oriented. I also noted–as have many other scholars–that J.M Keynes, whose economic theories were the subject of some upcoming lectures, had been a homosexual and that this might be useful to know when considering his short-run economic policy recommendation and his famous dictum “in the long run we are all dead.”

I think we have become enthralled by nonsense. And this coming from someone who spent the evening watching Chevy Chase films

A comment at Brad DeLong’s place had a quote from Keynes which almost echoes Burke:

The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease … But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.

Whew! Thanks, Niall!

This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen homophobic attacks on the legacy of Keynes (and it’s not even the first time Ferguson has done it).

Sally Marks, a World War I and Treaty of Versailles apologist, claimed that Keynes’ famous writings against the Treaty were “shaped by his passion for Carl Melchior, the German financier and reparations expert whom he met during negotiations at Spa shortly after the armistice.” I believe this same claim was later repeated by Ferguson as well.

Perhaps the same can be said about Adam Smith’s economic philosophy, that it was fashioned not by observation and reality but by the fact that he was eccentric and childless, like Keynes.

Niall Ferguson was never not a crank.. he was predicting war with Iran in 2006 calling Ahmadinejad, literally, the new Hitler

“So history repeated itself. As in the 1930s, an anti-Semitic demagogue broke his country’s treaty obligations and armed for war. Having first tried appeasement, offering the Iranians economic incentives to desist, the West appealed to international agencies – the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Security Council. Thanks to China’s veto, however, the UN produced nothing but empty resolutions and ineffectual sanctions, like the exclusion of Iran from the 2006 World Cup finals”

It’s just now that he’s attacked a member of the British upper class people start reconsidering whether this racists idiot might be a little off

I think what has been missed in the uproar over Ferguson’s comments is the way in which the anti-fiscal stimulus discourse works. It makes an analogy between the government and a household, and warns that excessive debt will be a burden for future generations. So those who promote government spending are at best careless, and at worst cynically passing off a heavy burden to the taxpayers of tomorrow. The Keynes quote, “In the long run we are all dead,” is tailor-made for this claim. Never mind that, as pointed out in the post, this is not what Keynes meant. And never mind that government debt is not like household debt. For many people, the discourse makes sense. Add to that the massive rise of individual debt as a response to flat wages and now high unemployment, plus the moral economy of debt highlighted by Graeber and others, and, sadly, I fear that the anti-fiscal stimulus, pro-austerity discourse remains strong.

From Robert Skidelsky’s one volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, pages 403-4:

That long blockquote from Letters on a Regicide Peace has nothing to do with fathers and sons, or short- versus long-term thinking, so I cannot tell what point you intended to make with it. All it proves is that Burke did not think statesmen could eradicate ambition but did think they could make it serve useful ends (short- and long-term both, presumably), provided that satirists, moralists, and judges were around to check its excesses. A man’s politics would have to be eccentric indeed to find any part of that argument incriminating.

When Burke did write about his son, he was explicit about how painful and unnatural it was that Richard predeceased him:

Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succession, I should have been, according to my mediocrity and the mediocrity of the age I live in, a sort of founder of a family: I should have left a son . . . But a Disposer whose power we are little able to resist, and whose wisdom it behoves us not at all to dispute, has ordained it in another manner, and (whatever my querulous weakness might suggest) a far better. The storm has gone over me; and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricanes has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honours; I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth! . . .

I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me are gone before me. They who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors. I owe to the dearest relation (which ever must subsist in memory) that act of piety which he would have performed to me: I owe it to him to show that he was not descended, as the Duke of Bedford would have it, from an unworthy parent.

The fact that Burke “left no one behind,” as you say, was to him a violation of the natural order of things. Which means that he had a deep sense of what is the natural order of things: to live with posterity in mind.

What prompted Ferguson can be seen in a half-dozen YouTubes of him holding forth at various conferences and TV shows. He always slips into indignant repugnance of any thought or suggestion of government solutions. Because it will end Western civilization! Add this moral view to his intellectual failure to understand the reasoning of the Keynesian paradigm, as well as the reason for the paradigm’s occasional necessity in economic matters. He has never bothered to show that he can explain Keynesianism as well as any Keynesian: the sort of demonstration which is the sine qua non of intellectual honesty. Once you combine the moral simpletonianism with the intellectual failure, you are not in unusual territory, you have arrived at the foundation of the political split in the Atlantic economies.

@ 14 Sally Marks is one of the most respected historians of the postwar settlement. Your baseless slander has no place in this academic forum. Provide evidence that her argument about reparations has fallen out of favor or shut up and pick up a history book (you’ll find that her approach has been endorsed by Stephen Schuker, Marc Trachtenberg, Robert Boyce, and many other great historians working on this topic).

SCHUMPETER, CAPITALISM, FATS AND FOCUS ON THE FAMILY
You may recall that Fats Limbaugh attacked Mike Huckabee for not being a real conservative because the Huckster wasn’t a devotee of the Free Market Fairy. At the time I thought this signaled an irreparable breajk between the Jeebus Fundies and the Free Market Fundies but I was wrong (e.g., Michele Bachmann). That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a rift between these religious sects and Joseph Schumpeter, one of the 20th Century Apostles of the Free Market Fairy, admitted as much in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy,. first published in 1942. You can get an image PDF here and convert it to searchable text if you have Adobe Acrobat.

On pages 157-58 Schumpter notes that the calculations of Homo Economicus lead to the conclusion that having children simply doesn’t pay:

Still more important however is another “internal cause,” viz. the disintegration of the bourgeois family. … To men and women in modern capitalist societies, family life and parenthood mean less than they meant before and hence are less powerful molders of behavior;

As soon as men and women learn the utilitarian lesson and refuse to take for granted the traditional arrangements that their social environment makes for them, as soon as they acquire the habit of weighing the individual advantages and disadvantages of any prospective course of action–or, as we might also put it, as soon as they introduce into their private life a sort of inarticulate system of cost accounting -they cannot fail to become aware of the heavy personal sacrifices that family ties and especially parenthood entail under modern conditions and of the fact that at the same time, excepting the cases of farmers and peasants, children cease to be economic assets. These sacrifices do not consist only of the items that come within the reach of the measuring rod of money but comprise in addition an indefinite amount of loss of comfort, of freedom from care, and opportunity to enjoy alternatives of increasing attractiveness and variety-alternatives to be compared with joys of parenthood that are being subjected to a critical analysis of increasing severity.

Posted by Steve J. at 5:53 PM

On the in the long run we’re all dead.

I rather thought it was in response to classical (or possibly neo-classical) economists who insisted that things would always sort themselves out in the long run, without intervention. To which Keynes then says, yes, but in the long run we’re all dead.

And Ferguson is of course being vile. As @23. Reasonably well known that Keynes desired children and attempted to have at least one. To mock the unwantedly infertile is indeed vile.

If the right wing is so concerned about their children’s future then why the Hell are they so intent on ignoring global warming?

See also E. Klein
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/04/yes-gay-couples-plan-for-the-future-in-fact-theyre-really-good-at-it/

As T. Worstall above and no doubt DeLong and others have mentioned, Keynes’s remark was directed vs. economists who, as Klein puts it, “comfort themselves with the assumption that economies self-correct over time rather than figuring out how to make those corrections shorter and less painful.” (I thought Keynes argued that economies in depression would not ‘self-correct’ at all, though that’s not really inconsistent w Klein’s interp.)

For what it’s worth, my imagination just as readily tells an opposite story:

Among educated persons who are likely to have spent some time contemplating politics, it is the Breeders who are more likely to turn their attentions inward to their kin-group, to retract the circle of human sympathy to themselves and their own, and put away foolish thoughts of A Better World. Those without children readily tire of only seeking self gratification and may continue to better see and pursue the Greater Good.

It’s just as stupid (perhaps) as the opposite idea that Breeders Know Best.

I ‘d bet someone has made the point that is more like sculpture that painting: true statements are what remain once all of the indulgent, unexamined, and unknowable thoughts are subtracted.

Among educated persons who are likely to have spent some time contemplating politics, it is the Breeders who are more likely to turn their attentions inward to their kin-group, to retract the circle of human sympathy to themselves and their own, and put away foolish thoughts of A Better World.

Edward Carpenter made a version of this argument in 1894 in his excellent pamphlet, Homogenic Love with respect to what he called ‘the responsibilities and impedimenta of family life’, and he commented that if ‘the love of Harmodius had been for a wife and children at home, he would probably not have cared, and it would hardly have been his business, to slay the tyrant’.

“Keynes’s remark was directed vs. economists who, as Klein puts it, “comfort themselves with the assumption that economies self-correct over time rather than figuring out how to make those corrections shorter and less painful.””

This is purely surmise on my part but I get the impression that it was really aimed at the likes of Schumpeter himself, as the leading Austrian of the day. Which is why Schumpeter’s academic obituary makes that crack about Keynes being childless and thus not interested in the long term.

Laughs last laughs longest etc: and yes, I do get the impression that academia can be that patty.

Grr.

“patty.”

petty

Pomposity is by far the worst of Ferguson’s crimes against good sense, I would say, even though it’s the least intentional — less so, anyway, than the petty viciousness he exhibits toward those he dismisses as not being gifted with his advantages. A quote from Canfora’s Democracy in Europe seems apt:

Whoever claims to have understood everything with hindsight cannot be taken seriously: this is typical of the extra-temporal lightness of liberal thought, the eternal judge outside the dimension of time.

Wow, Niall really struck a nerve here, didn’t he? A third tier conservative suggests that big deficit spending is rather selfish, and watch the selfish people leap to hysterically defend the big deficit spending, eh?

“Wow, Niall really struck a nerve here, didn’t he?”

On the Internet we call that “trolling”.

b9n10nt writes: Those without children readily tire of only seeking self gratification and may continue to better see and pursue the Greater Good.

Plato also made that argument.

First in was Reinhart & Rogoff’s 90% debt/GDP cliff fraud, then Yglesias’ rational choice between dying of hunger and dying crushed psychopathy, and now Ferguson’s gays are selfish stupidity – all in a good week.

Yes, neoliberalism is a cruel farce. Now what?

Keynes was arguably a *follower* of Burke. Skidelsky’s full biography discusses (154-7 of vol. 1) Burke’s influence and returns to this theme in passing theme a few more times in volumes 2 and 3. _Essays in Persuasion_ seem to me quite compatible with Burke. More interestingly, Keynes’ doctrine of fundamental uncertainty emphasizes caution about remote outcomes.(http://membres.multimania.fr/yannickperez/site/Keynes%201937.PDF)

This is the weird part about NF’s latest effusion. Aside from the gay-bashing, which is now so unfashionable that he has had to apologize, it’s wrapped in several layers of stupid.

(If you *really* want to mess with yer categories, recall that Keynes was also a liberal eugenicist. See John Toye’s _Keynes on Population._(OUP 2000))

Wasn’t Edmund Burke involved in a murky relationship with his supposed kinsman Will Burke? Back in the 1970s, a scholar suggested that the two Burkes’ relationship might have been homosexual. I vaguely recall that arch-conservative Burkean M.J. Sobran felt at the time that the evidence for this was not wholly implausible and should not be dismissed out of hand.

In response to $59, that conversion, while less likely in current terms, was hardly impossible in the England where Keynes grew up — witness A D Knox (teacher of a teacher of mine), who moved from a relationship with Keynes to marriage and children, also Lennox Berkeley, once involved with Britten, later married with children.

Not to mention a large number of college educated women in the US — a phenomenon still common among my daughter’s friends whom she describes as “four year lesbians.”

In response to Gene O’Grady, since we have so much documentation on 20th Century English writers, it’s not difficult to come up with the names of others who converted from a homosexual lifestyle to a heterosexual lifestyle, such as Stephen Spender and Evelyn Waugh.

“Wasn’t Edmund Burke involved in a murky relationship with his supposed kinsman Will Burke?”

And I won’t vote Whig until an apology is issued

Why is there so much spite and name-calling in this thread? It’s just a waste of time.

As amusing as the homophobia of Ferguson, Schumpeter, et al may be, its implication is even more offensive: that conventional macroeconomics is perversely short-sighted and destructive, that traditional austerity is self-evidently the sole path to virtue. I’m belaboring the obvious, of course, but there are too many states still in the grip of a blinkered and constipated market idolatry to let it pass unremarked.

“Wow, Niall really struck a nerve here, didn’t he?”

Always amusing to hear about striking nerves from people who take earth day to be a communist pagan plot to take over America.

Always amusing to hear about striking nerves from people who take earth day to be a communist pagan plot to take over America.

Two sides of the same coin. US conservatives don’t evaluate political statements based on truth value, but on whether they work as shibboleths, reliably distinguishing members of the tribe from outsiders. Ferguson’s statement and the assertion that Earth Day is a communist plot work equally well.

Jeffrey Davis, I like the poetry on your blog, so I’ll try to be more polite than I usually am: we in fact do account for this very well within our contemporary philosophies. Someone who is attracted to both men and women is considered to be bisexual. Keynes pretty definitionally was, since he chose to sleep with men, and then later on chose to get married and sleep with a woman.

Bisexual people really tend to not like it when people treat them as weird outliers that don’t fit into a binary. Fitting people into binaries is what conservatives do, of course, since they desperately need to classify everyone within a hierarchy: that’s why they have to say that Keynes “converted” from a “homosexual lifestyle” to a heterosexual one. But for a bisexual person to sometimes have partners of either gender is no more surprising than for a heterosexual person to have a new partner of the same gender as before when they sleep with a new person.

And again: the days in which it was a topic of debate as to whether B should be added to LG are long past. And we haven’t even gotten to the T or Q yet! Bisexuals are not weird or dysfunctional or “converting” gays or heterosexuals. This thread, based on a kind of parody that doesn’t question sufficiently what Ferguson was doing, has predictably attracted some very despicable people, and don’t respond to them in such a way that validates them even to this extent.

Thank you, Rich — well said.

To the category of bisexual we can add the category of gay men who marry women and live an outwardly heterosexual lifestyle out of acquiescence to societal pressure (it shouldn’t need to be pointed out that homosexual acts were a criminal offense in Keynes’ time). Keynes may have been bisexual, or he may have chosen to repress his sexual orientation by marrying a woman. We’ll never really know, and it really doesn’t matter, because it has fuck-all to do with his work, which is ostensibly what Ferguson was talking about.

The notion that a gay man marrying a woman represents some kind of “conversion” is laughable, repugnant, and totally unsurprising coming from the likes of Sailer.

I don’t know how having another sexual bin fits into Vidal’s rejection of the idea of sexual bins. Defining ourselves by the scope of our affections doesn’t seem a good idea to me. Vidal’s statement seems to push in that direction.

As for censoring your reaction to my comments for my poems?! That’s like the time I got my first discount for being a senior. It was at Hallmark and I was buying a birthday card for my daughter.

@74 Ascribing people identity profiles according their sexual practice is a reactionary bourgeois nonsense. Sexual preferences are not cast in stone, but fluid and change with age, experience, emotional condition, external pressure, etc…

Hey, I wonder if Keynes’ feeling that “It is not agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all the money and the power and brains” and “[Jews] have in them deep-rooted instincts that are antagonistic and therefore repulsive to the European” may have colored his economic history theories at all?

I would think that it is worse to be anti-semitic and say such things about Jews and be gay, than it is to point out that he was gay and that might have influenced his economic views… but then again, I bet that some on here disagree.

Look around at the company that you keep- you are all frantically defending someone whose economic theories are wrong and destroy wealth and who personally was anti-semitic (and gay too, not that it matters).

The above remarks by Keynes need not be read as anti-Semitic. My old mother classified people by race (as in “what race are south Italians?) without being at all racist. It was just the way people thought back then – they put people in boxes labelled by “race”. See also Keynes thinking on eugenics.

Keynes certainly expressed some surprising thoughts later in life. This passage reflecting on the Bloomsbury Group is from his memoirs:

With St Francis of Assisi, who at least made collections for the birds, it follows that we were amongst the first of our generation, perhaps alone amongst our generation, to escape from the Benthamite tradition. In practice, of course, at least so far as I was concerned, the outside world was not forgotten or forsworn. But I am recalling what our Ideal was in those early days when the life of passionate contemplation and communion was supposed to oust all other purposes whatever. It can be no part of this memoir for me to try to explain why it was such a big advantage for us to have escaped from the Benthamite tradition. But I do now regard that as the worm which has been gnawing at the insides of modern civilisation and is responsible for its present moral decay. We used to regard the Christians as the enemy, because they appeared as the representatives of tradition, convention and hocus-pocus. In truth it was the Benthamlte calculus, based on an over-valuation of the economic criterion, which was destroying the quality of the popular Ideal.

Moreover, it was this escape from Bentham, joined with the unsurpassable individualism of our philosophy, which has served to protect the whole lot of us from the final reductio ad absurdum of Benthamism known as Marxism. We have completely failed, indeed, to provide a substitute for these economic bogus-faiths capable of protecting or satisfying our successors. But we ourselves have remained – am I not right in saying all of us? – altogether immune from the virus, as safe in the citadel of our ultimate faith as the Pope of Rome in his.

I have said that we were amongst the first to escape from Benthamism. But of another eighteenth-century heresy we were the unrepentant heirs and last upholders. We were among the last of the Utopians, or meliorists as they are sometimes called, who belIeve in a continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already consists of reliable, rational, decent people, influenced by truth and objective standards, who can be safely released from the outward restraints of convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct, and left, from now onwards, to their own sensible devices, pure motives and reliable intuitions of the good. The view that human nature is reasonable had in 1903 quite a long history behind it. It underlay the ethics of self-interest – rational self-interest as it was called – just as much as the universal ethics of Kant or Bentham which aimed at the general good; and it was because self-interest was rational that the egoistic and altruistic systems were supposed to work out in practice to the same conclusions.

In short, we repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin, of there being insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men. We were not aware that civilization was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved. We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom. We lacked reverence, as [D.H.] Lawrence observed and as Ludwig [Wittgenstein] with justice also used to say – for everything and everyone. It did not occur to us to respect the extraordinary accomplishment of our predecessors in the ordering of life (as it now seems to me to have been) or the elaborate framework which they had devised to protect this order… As cause and consequence of our general state of mind we completely misunderstood human nature, including our own…

And as the years wore on towards 1914, the thinness and superficiality, as well as the falsity, of our view of man’s heart became, as it now seems to me, more obvious; and there was, too, some falling away from the purity of the original doctrine… I fancy we used in old days to get round the rich variety of experience by expanding illegitimately the field of aesthetic appreciation… classifying as aesthetic experience what is really human experience and somehow sterilising it by this mis-classification.

If, therefore, I altogether ignore our merits – our charm, our intelligence, our unworldiness, our affection – I can see us as water-spiders, gracefully skimming, as light and reasonable as air, the surface of the stream without any contact at all with the eddies and currents underneath. And if I imagine us as coming under the observation of Lawrence’s ignorant, jealous, irritable, hostile eyes, what a combination of qualities we offered to arouse his passionate distaste; this thin rationalism skipping on the crust of the lava, ignoring both the reality and the value of the vulgar passions, joined to a libertinism and comprehensive irreverence, too clever by half for such an earthy character as Bunny [David Garnett], seducing with its intellectual chic such a portent as [Lady] Ottoline [Morrell], a regular skin-poison. All this was very unfair to poor, silly, well-meaning us. But that is why I say that there may have been just a grain of truth when Lawrence said in 1914 that we were ‘done for.’

Steve Sailer: “Didn’t Keynes convert from a homosexual lifestyle to a heterosexual lifestyle during the 1920s after falling in love with prima ballerina Lydia Lopokova? I realize these days that’s supposed to be impossible, but it does seem to be well documented in this case.”

I remember in one of my undergraduate courses reading about a tribe in which the men lived as homosexuals from puberty until full adulthood, after which they married a woman. Later, of course, while still married they served as older partners for adolescent males. So the scenario you lay out is certainly possible, although the use of the word “convert” seems too strong.

“I remember in one of my undergraduate courses reading about a tribe in which the men lived as homosexuals from puberty until full adulthood, after which they married a woman. ”

This society used to be known as the ‘English Public School System’.