From my new VDARE.com column:
Harvard financial historian Niall Ferguson has gotten himself into the usual sort of Larry Summers / James D. Watson-style trouble for answering a question about economist John Maynard Keynes’s famous quip—“In the long run, we are all dead”—by cheekily pointing out that Keynes was a childless homosexual. ...
Ferguson commented: “In the long run our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are alive, and will have to deal with the consequences of our economic actions.” ...
(In contrast to Keynes, the philoprogenitive Ferguson has three children by his first wife and one by his latest, the courageous anti-Islamist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.)
Ferguson’s off-the-cuff comments generated a vast global spasm of gasping and tsk-tsking. A Google search of “niall ferguson keynes gay” comes up with over two million hits.
Why the hysteria?
Posts
69 comments:
antihomitism or antisodomitism.
“In the long run, we are all dead”—by cheekily pointing out that Keynes was a childless homosexual. ...
Ferguson is implying Keynes had a devil may care attitude towards the future. The cheek here is the gross misinterpretation of the point Keynes was making.
The quote in full reads
"The 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 past the ocean is flat again."
You are giving Ferguson too much credit. He is an outspoken neocon. And like other fallen gentile neocons, he mistook his membership to the club as a green light to speak his mind. Now he is having a rude awaking.
Ferguson is a pretty good writer. His recent "The Great Degeneration" is excellent, although he clearly knows a lot more than he lets on. Clearly the social and mental repression out there is even greater than the "financial repression" (the term that describes keeping interest rates near zero all over the world).
Pinko de gayo.
He apologized...
I stopped reading the article when you mentioned courageous Ayan Hirsi Ali.
Stealing people's husbands is always courageous.
certainly more to keynes.
http://chasvoice.blogspot.com/2011/08/john-maynard-keynes-lavender-bolshevik.html
Always thought the Keynes would have been horrified to see what had been done with his work. Love him or hate him what we call Keynesianism would be almost unrecognizable to Keynes.
On a similar note.... Krugnutz is childless.... we can all take comfort in that.
What Keynes meant when he said "in the the long run...":
"The point of the quote is that in the long run everything would be fine, since markets do get to full employment, and so, even without intervention, deflation and inflation do its magic, but the process is too long and painful, so it would be more reasonable to act in the short run. This was typical of the Cambridge version of Marginalism, which was very much in favor of government intervention to deal with market imperfections in the short run. This is true of Marshal and Pigou, as well as Robertson, and certainly Keynes, before the General Theory. Note that this does not mean, as most people think, that one should only be concerned with the short run. The point is that action in the short run facilitates the road towards the fully adjusted equilibrium in the long run."
More here and here.
So do Gays support immigration or not?
Were the Fabians Gay?
Why is the Catholic church the worlds oldest institution if childless people do not care about the future?
Norman Mailer wrote a story, The Time of Her Time, about a wild swinging city guy, circa late fifties maybe, O'Shaugnessy?, who was "combing the pussy out of his hair." He had a loft, was a cool arty type. He ended up with this woman, Denise, 'Den of ease' says Norman somewhere, and he had sexual congress with her but into the 'sterile warehouse of her anus.'
It shocked the sh*t out of me in the early seventies but now it seems passe.
Isn't that the point though, that Niall Ferguson inadvertently made, Mows(Did you mow the lawn? Ha ha) have genes but these genes end up in those sterile warehouses full of the latest tastefully decorated furniture. Those genes are going nowhere, they come from for-the-nonce boys who are gentrifying old houses on Scrotal Road.
But it is a dead end road.
Reign of terror, indeed.
A problem for the N. Ferguson haters is that he is essentially correct in his characterization of the homosexual epistemology. Which means they just have to work that much harder to protect the narrative.
Great article. I seem to recall Skidelsky made much the same observation, to no reaction, but can't find it now.
It's a shorter long run for gay men.
I'd be willing to bet that gay men have been dying young from various venereal diseases for a long time.
What these people flipped over was the implication that gay men aren't helper worker bees in the human hive. Saying gay men are selfish, short-sighted hedonists who don't care about the future is an implicit statement that homosexuality is not a helpful uncle adaptation, and gay men don't have other people's best interests at heart. They don't, and nothing hurts like the truth.
Good work on the Keynes article.
Keynes' theories, by valorizing the role of moneylending and money printing in smoothing the business cycle, have had the effect of empowering the Federal government and the big banks, which are part of the bond sales and money printing apparatus.
If you like the idea of the big banks and the Federal government taking over everything, you'll love Keynes.
Those who want more Federal spending and those whose financial interests are tied to the banks have promoted Keynes' work since the 1930's.
I'm disappointed Ferguson apologized. As far as public intellectuals go, he's one of the most entertaining. Apologizing to the Thought Police doesn't mollify them in the slightest, and it emboldens them to seek out other targets. But, money is money, and so I suppose he figured caving in would keep the gravy train rolling.
From the few paragraphs you posted here I thought, "Oh great, another right-wing display of pop psychology, explaining why someone believes what he does." Basically, a repeat of Niall Ferguson's stupid remark.
Then I read your article, and it wasn't what I expected at all. It was an interesting look at Keynes' personality, including his homosexuality, and his beliefs, and how they might be related. Kudos.
Like Ferguson, the British politician-journalist Robert Boothby thought that Keynes’s homoerotic attraction to a German financial representative at the Versailles conference biased Keynes’ judgment about the peace treaty’s reparations clauses, causing too much sympathy for the Germans and thus a kind of treaty guilt that crippled early policy toward Hitler. “Cleverest man I ever knew…,” Boothby wrote of Keynes, but he doubted Keynes’s wisdom.
Like Keynes, Boothby was clever and sometimes unstable and led a complex romantic life. He boinked the wife of this senior colleague, Harold McMillan, for a quarter of a century and then in the 1950s took up with rough-trade boys.
My own view is that it is just about impossible to say anything excessive about a British aristocrat’s sex life.
The reason people point it out is because Ferguson's remarks were remarkably stupid even on their own terms. Literally every aspect of the argument from assumptions to conclusion is wrong.
1. Keynes didn't think about the long run.
False. Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren was a celebrated essay in the midst of the depression all about the longest run.
2. Keynes stopped thinking about the long-run at the time of The General Theory.
False. TGT includes a section on long-run growth policies. Keynes arguments turned out to be false.
3. Keynes has that famous quote about how he doesn't care about the long-run. That's not at all what the quote is about:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/keynes-keynesians-the-long-run-and-fiscal-policy/
4. Keynes wasn't an exclusive homosexual and appears to have gotten bored of his partners. He married straight. It's also very likely he had some kind of ballerina fetish around the 20s.
5. WORST of all, Keynes & wife tried multiple times to have children - his wife had two, possibly three miscarriages.
Ferguson might be a good historian, but he's a shit biographer and a shit economist.
>>> I stopped reading the article when you mentioned courageous Ayan Hirsi Ali
Your loss.
This whole Keynesianism-is-short-term-oriented-because-Keynes-was-gay-and-gays-are-a-hedonistic-high-time-preference-group was coined by Hans-Hermann Hoppe quite a while ago. I vaguely remember reading about it on Tom Palmer's blog, a prominent gay libertarian.
Hoppe on the incident: "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."
Ironically, Hoppe got in the exact same problem for the exact same argument.
http://mises.org/daily/1792
I sense mainstreamer Ferguson is getting into Austrian economics. He's literally quoting from Hoppe.
Thankfully for Ferguson, Hoppe doesn't believe in copyrights, otherwise he'd have another problem...
The 1906 Strachey quote about hundred-year planning is yet another form evidence that they cared about the long run.
Lots of Keynes-bashing comes from stagflation 70s nightmares and a prolonged current credit crisis. I also suspect people want to spit in the eyes of the likes of Krugman and Bernanke as much as they can -- can't blame them...
The spirit of Keynes' "The economic consequences of the peace" after WWI showed Keynes to be a man of great foresight. He even quit the talks in protest, that's how strongly he felt. It was the exact opposite of high time preference.
But the point still stands, as a group gays might well be more less future oriented, partly because they don't have children. They should check the data, not shriek about hate. Idiots.
Steve Sailer said...
The evidence for Travolta being gay has always been far stronger than for Cruise.
9/26/12, 3:01 PM
Somewhat confirmed today.
It's about the POWER as a means to Palestinianize straight gentile society. We need an intifadah, and this is why Jews and homos wanna grab our guns.
Controversy brewing: Heritage author wrote that immigration should be based on IQ:
http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/08/heritage-study-co-author-opposed-letting-in-immigrants-with-low-iqs/
Keynesianism works best when the economy doesn't expect it. But if the economy has grown to expect(and even demand)it, Keynesianism becomes an addiction than a cure.
Imagine a gambler who lost all his money. He's feeling down and out and suicidal. He feels shame and expects no help. But suppose his money is returned with a stern warning not to gamble again. He might feel relieved and grateful that might do real good.
But suppose a gambler has his losses returned to him along with the assurance of the same in the future. It will turn the gambler into an even worse gambler.
This is why amnesty won't work. It's never devised as a ONE-AND-ONLY-ONE-TIME-THING but as promises of future amnesties in the future.
Even libs must fear the current tide of immigration, but the media have associated open borders with moral superiority, and moral narcissism is a hard habit to break. It's like a drug. So, even if libs don't like immigration, they savor the moral high that comes with supporting shamnesty so much that they act against their gut instinct of what is best foe America.
Animals that live in packs, such as wolves and baboons, are very good at recognizing who is in their pack and who belongs to other competing, inimical packs.
These animals are also adept at knowing the status of each animal in the pack's hierarchy. As Whiskey has sometimes pointed out, the females tend to dislike the beta males, and they know exactly who they are.
Thanks for all you do, Steve, to elevate the level of discourse above the subhuman, and for all the rejection and abuse you have endured from these packs of baboons and wolves.
Nice piece on Keynes. You forgot to mention his essay on "The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren."
Though Keynes' answer to the Great Depression was a short-term one in my opinion (depending on inflation and the money illusion to get real wages down, and hence the volume of employment up) and though he disguised it with a lot of sophistical distractions (liquidity traps, effective demand, etc.) I still think his off-the-cuff quip that "in the long-run we are all dead" was a case of a mans wit getting the better of his true intentions.
Niall Ferguson has gotten himself into the usual sort of Larry Summers / James D. Watson-style trouble for answering a question about economist John Maynard Keynes’s famous quip—“In the long run, we are all dead”—by cheekily pointing out that Keynes was a childless homosexual.
Nobody can take a joke anymore, especially a joke about homosexuality.
You worried in your posts a few months ago that you were getting old and losing your edge. Relax. This posting is a real gem. Remarkable scholarship.
Homosexuality is almost certainly on the way out. Ewald, Cochran and Harpending all believe in the gay germ theory. Me too. Infections get cured.
But in the meantime while we wait it's interesting to contemplate just why homosexuality is such an important issue. It really shouldn't be. The fact that it is and always has been cries out for an explanation.
I used to live next door to the Castro in San Francisco. I had formerly lived next door to the black ghetto in Washington DC. In Washington I bought a gun and worried about security. In San Francisco I had no such worries. Gay men in the neighborhood are just about the least troublesome social problem you can have. I knew lots of gays and had a few gay friends but none of them were the kind I would invite over for dinner. They just lived their lives and I mine.
But in the words of Obama - they punch above their weight. Gays are very successful politically. I think it's masculinity.
My first wife ran the SF YWCA. She had the big downtown facility that provided shelter and services to young women. Her board was all female. The much more dynamic YMCA in the City allowed women on their board but the YWCA wouldn't let a man serve. They feared that if they let in even one man they would quickly take over. Men were seen as a danger because they were so much more politically competent.
The YWCA didn't even have a pro-female political focus. Their motto at that time was "End Racism". Somehow they thought women's issues were less important than the race issues.
I think this is generally true of female organization unless they are dominated by lesbians. If that's true it would be for the same reason - men are better at organizing themselves into task oriented groups. The lesbian brain seems to be just masculinized enough to overcome the political ineffectiveness of normal women. I realize that this doesn't make complete sense - but there it is.
Somewhere in these disorganized ramblings there may be a clue as to why gays are so potent politically.
Albertosaurus
Steve you have a really poor understanding of homosexuality, despite writing about it for a long time. For example, you endorsed Michael Baily's theory that male bisexuals didn't exist, which he now has withdrawn because he started finding them when he stopped focusing his studies on men he met in Chicago gay bars. He found plenty of bisexuals by trolling ads for MMF threesomes. But a basic knowledge of history, and the many bisexuals like Keynes, would have allowed you to recognize Bailey's error immediately.
You may well just be a bigot on the issue. On one hand, we have a neocon warmonger giving a speech to stockbrokers who rip off widows and gullible middle class professions for a living, and on the other a man who recognized that the harsh conditions imposed by Versailles on Germany could never be met and would lead to further conflict.
Further still, the particular theory that Keynes' advocacy of leniency for Germany was because he was smitten with lust for Melchior is belied by the fact that Melchior was 11 years older than Keynes, much shorter, and in general a bit ugly. Keynes was an aristocratic super-diplomat living in gay Meccas of Cambridge and London, he had no need to resort to a pudgy, straight, short, Jewish, and much older banker. It is simply much more logical that they were simply friends who recognized the folly of the Allies who wanted to permanantly de industrialize and hobble Germany.
Morality, from a value system for defending society to an addictive drug for destroying society.
That was an excellent article, Steve, one of the best you've written. Very informative and thought-provoking.
One great value of the homo agenda as a social experiment is it opened my eyes to the fact that so many people are easy suckers.
How did a society that laughed at such thing come to embrace it as the primary moral value? Now, we can understand how rise of Hitlerism and Maoism happened. In every nation, most people are suckers. There's no mystery. It's just that suckers fall for propaganda dished out by the elites, especially if the propaganda is promoted with lots of colors and fanfare.
How does one continue to be a free thinker in a world of suckers manipulated and corrupted by contemptuous elites?
Anonymous said...
I stopped reading the article when you mentioned courageous Ayan Hirsi Ali.
....
I that annoyed me too but I kept reading. You missed a good article.
I consider Ferguson and Hirsi Ali to be not all that different from those greedy-eyed husband and wife teams who leer at me from bus shelter ads for local real estate agencies. Ferguson and his new wife are essentially well-paid hustlers for the neocons and globalists.
homocarthyism
Was Hitleromics a form of Keynesianism?
The Ferger has said many controversial things about Muslims and Chinese, but no problem. But he jokes about some homoconomist, and he has to get down on his knees and beg forgiveness.
MSM would have us believe it's a case of a powerful straight person showing sensitivity to a helpless minority, but it's really a case of court jester apologizing to the duke or prince for making a bad joke. "I was only kidding, sire. Please don't cut off me head."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjErYiYY1VM
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/465175/20130507/lauryn-hill-tax-trial.htm
Affirmative (Tax)Evasion.
I think Mr. Sailer goes too easy on Keynes' economic policies. He like no other man set the fiscal road to ruin for the western world. Then again Sailer admits he is not strong on macro so can't fault him and this is a great piece on Keynes.
What is interesting about Keynes is that he was very loose with his opinions. The great historian Ralph Raico tried to give an account of where Keynes really stood:
https://mises.org/daily/4251
According to this nemisis and friend Hayek, Keynes was more balanced then his followers but died before he could "change public opinion":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqU-AZh-wqU
For someone who is supposedly part of the warmongering neocon crowd, Ferguson did write an excellent contrarian book on World War I called "The Pity of War". The premise was that Britain should never have gone to war against Germany, and only did so due to a series of colossal blunders and misjudgments. In the end, Britain lost four times the number of troops that it lost during WW2. Visit any war memorial in any town in the UK where the dead are listed by each conflict, and you can see the truth of this. A great pity indeed.
And yet Keynes foresaw the satisfaction of basic human needs through economic progress by the year 2030:
Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren
http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
Niall Ferguson is probably the 50,000th person historically to notice the the correlation between " In the long run, we are all dead " and Keynes' homosexuality. He is however, probably the first prominent member of the global elite to say it out loud in public. The MSM is literally going bonkers over an off-hand remark that has been probably been made in every economics department in the English speaking world since 1946. A friend of a friend who majored in economics in the Ivy League told him that FDR wouldn't listen to any of Keynes' ideas when a meeting was arranged, because Roosevelt disliked gay people, and it was clear to Roosevelt that Keynes was gay. Don't know if the anecdote is true, but he gave my friend the impression that lots of students and faculty have speculated about the connection between his quip and his personal life. Truly a tempest in a teapot.
Hirsi Ali was a pro-Iraq War neocon fellow traveler and is an atheist secular humanist. Not worth calling courageous if you value non-interventionism and Tradition.
And Ferguson is not even the first to have made this point! Hans-Hermann Hoppe said pretty much the same thing a few years ago, and I believe the economist who originally made the observation may have been Joseph Schumpeter.
My takeaway:
We should figure out a way to let cats out of the bag with plausible deniability intact.
Once that is done, un-PC statements can be uttered more safely.
"We're all childless homosexuals now." -Nixon
Why the hysteria?
Well, hysteria sells to women like sex sells to men.
To push the Dennis Dale analogy, the Left pursuing the rest of us into the Weeds is historically a bad move, many military defeats have resulted from over pursuit, as forces lose cohesion, pursue into the weeds, and face counter-attacks and ambushes.
As for Keynes, the short run financial stimulus ends up being disastrous in the long run, heavy debt overhangs, limits to government action, all for basically pumping up elite employment
Apologizing to the Thought Police doesn't mollify them in the slightest, and it emboldens them to seek out other targets.
Not only other targets but they're emboldened to re-attack the same target. Once you've apologized you've admitted what you said was wrong, so the focus of the attack just moves on to "does this person really belong in his job if he can say something like that?" Look what happened to Larry Summers.
Better to stand by what you said even if it will be difficult to defend.
well, steve ferguson has made this statement multiple times before. so to say it was off-the-cuff is approximately 100% incorrect.
You may well just be a bigot on the issue. On one hand, we have a neocon warmonger giving a speech to stockbrokers who rip off widows and gullible middle class professions for a living, and on the other a man who recognized that the harsh conditions imposed by Versailles on Germany could never be met and would lead to further conflict.
Sounds like somebody is a bigot on the issue, but I don't think it's Steve. You could not have written a more laughably biased description of the two men if you tried.
ferguson has made this statement multiple times before
If that's true then you have to wonder why the Thought Police swung into action this time.
"For example, you endorsed Michael Baily's theory that male bisexuals didn't exist"
What about trisexuals who go for men, women, and transsexual men or transsexual women?
Or quadrasexuals who go for men, women, transsexual men, AND transsexual women?
"Nobody can take a joke anymore, especially a joke about homosexuality."
Gays are not very gay. They are bitchy, demanding, and venomous.
I think gays should really be called hissies or pissies. So easily pissed off and hissing all the time, these queenies.
But Ferguson felt it necessary to issue “An Unqualified Apology” [May 4, 2013]because he makes a lot of money giving speeches to financial organizations, so he can’t afford to offend Designated Victim Groups that play a major role within them—such as gays, Jews, and women.
Don't forget Muslims! After all, aren't they pretty much the real victims of absolutely everything?
"If homos today were a victim group but without talent, wealth, and networking, Jews wouldn't give them the time of day. "
jews hate hate hate beta victims.
- bizarro world whiskey
Anon said: How did a society that laughed at such thing come to embrace it as the primary moral value? Now, we can understand how rise of Hitlerism and Maoism happened. In every nation, most people are suckers. There's no mystery. It's just that suckers fall for propaganda dished out by the elites, especially if the propaganda is promoted with lots of colors and fanfare.
I'm a young(ish) man who grew up in a lefty environment, and I remember a time when gay marriage wasn't even an issue. The speed with which it's gone from joke to gospel is a frightening testament to the plasticity of public opinion. On the bright side, that means that an equally rapid correction is possible, at least in theory.
-The Judean People's Front
I consider Ferguson and Hirsi Ali to be not all that different from those greedy-eyed husband and wife teams who leer at me from bus shelter ads for local real estate agencies.
Nicely done. That's a good line.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqxk0bYt4U8
Great movie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Nlaq16LD4I
It Takes a Village People
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4sMEEm9InM
It takes a village people.
The new white male.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN8bcJdNwGw
http://youtu.be/PsKpd4VEaCA
Help.
Albertosaurus must have lived since the age of the dinosaurs, if he is to have had time to experience all those personal experiences that he relates to. Of course, there are other explanations.
Even if Aayan Hirsi Ali is a husband-stealer, there is value in her. Given her background, she is expecially valuable in keeping the Muslims riled up. It stings more if someone who should be on your side rejects you!
Some googling shows that she gave birth to her and NF´s son recently, when she was over 40 years old herself. As far as I have been able to google, she has no previous children. Might be a case of the biological clock clanging really loudly.
Steve, I am interested in your views on macroeconomics. Are you an Austrian?
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