THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE

The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked
characteristic of mankind. Very few of us realize with conviction the
intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature
of the economic organization by which Western Europe has lived for the
last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of
our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we
lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we scheme
for social improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our
animosities and particular ambitions, and feel ourselves with enough
margin in hand to foster, not assuage, civil conflict in the European
family. Moved by insane delusion and reckless self-regard, the German
people overturned the foundations on which we all lived and built. But
the spokesmen of the French and British peoples have run the risk of
completing the ruin, which Germany began, by a Peace which, if it is
carried into effect, must impair yet further, when it might have
restored, the delicate, complicated organization, already shaken and
broken by war, through which alone the European peoples can employ
themselves and live.

In England the outward aspect of life does not yet teach us to feel or
realize in the least that an age is over. We are busy picking up the
threads of our life where we dropped them, with this difference only,
that many of us seem a good deal richer than we were before. Where we
spent millions before the war, we have now learnt that we can spend
hundreds of millions and apparently not suffer for it. Evidently we did
not exploit to the utmost the possibilities of our economic life. We
look, therefore, not only to a return to the comforts of 1914, but to an
immense broadening and intensification of them. All classes alike thus
build their plans, the rich to spend more and save less, the poor to
spend more and work less.

But perhaps it is only in England (and America) that it is possible to
be so unconscious. In continental Europe the earth heaves and no one but
is aware of the rumblings. There it is not just a matter of extravagance
or "labor troubles"; but of life and death, of starvation and existence,
and of the fearful convulsions of a dying civilization.

-- JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Posted via web from Jim Nichols