Daily Inspiration Quote by John Maynard Keynes

A whole culture of second-guessing hides inside Keynes's dry little barb: Americans, he suggests, don't just care what people think; they obsess over what they think everyone else thinks. It's not opinion as conviction but opinion as weather report. The punchline is in the phrase "average opinion believes average opinion to be" - a hall-of-mirrors construction that mimics the very behavior he's diagnosing, where certainty is outsourced to an imagined consensus.

Keynes is writing from the vantage point of an economist who watched markets and governments move on sentiment, not just facts. In the early 20th century - mass newspapers, polling's rise, advertising, and the churn of modern finance - public judgment starts to look less like deliberation and more like a feedback loop. His broader work on "animal spirits" and expectations makes the subtext clearer: when people anchor decisions to what they assume others will do, collective behavior can swing wildly. The irony is that the "average" becomes a kind of idol precisely because no one wants to be caught alone with an unfashionable view.

The line also lands as a cultural read on American modernity: a democratic society that prizes public opinion can slide into worshipping its own reflection. Keynes isn't mocking curiosity about others; he's warning about a self-referential crowd psychology where media, markets, and politics converge around the same anxious question: not "Is it true?" but "Is it what people like us are supposed to think?"