A decade and a half ago Lord Keynes brought together a selection of his writings on the political and economic issues from the end of the last war to the world slump of 1931. “Here are collected’, he wrote, ‘the croakings of twelve years, the croakings of a Cassandra who could never influence the course of events in time.” We know now that that was over-modest of him: that he exercised all too much influence by his book against the Treaty of Versailles — where he was almost entirely wrong!— and none at all up to that time with regard to monetary policy, the return to the Gold Standard and other issues where he was quite right. How characteristic of human affairs!

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "A decade and a half ago Lord Keynes brought together a selection of his writings on the political and economic issues from the end of the last war to the world slump of 1931. “Here are collected’, he wrote, ‘the croakings of twelve years, the croakings of a Cassandra who could never influence the course of events in time.” We know now that that was over-modest of him: that he exercised all too much influence by his book against the Treaty of Versailles — where he was almost entirely wrong!— and none at all up to that time with regard to monetary policy, the return to the Gold Standard and other issues where he was quite right. How characteristic of human affairs!" in the context of "A. L. Rowse, The End of an Epoch (1947), p. 1" to mean that wisdom is timeless.