One of John Maynard Keynes’s best-known quotes is also the most misused. His “in the long run we are all dead” quip has been interpreted as a call to focus policy efforts on correcting short-term swings in economic activity. This is perhaps manifested in James Carville’s slogan for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.” That voter prosperity today outweighs future economic considerations is indeed a flaw of liberal democracies everywhere.
Keynes goes on to say: “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.” Rather than encouraging short-termism, Keynes was critiquing economic models that complacently assume a return to some long-run point of balance.
The notion that Keynesian economics equated largely to near-term demand management was in part a convenience. Structural reforms are far harder than interest rate or tax tweaks. As they involve boosting the productive, or “supply side”, capacity of an economy — including its labour, capital, technology and ideas — they often enact a cost on today’s voters, for long-term gain. Those gains can be decades away, such as the benefits of investing in skills, education and research and development. They also rely on political commitment.