Daily Inspiration Quote by John Maynard Keynes

Keynes is doing something rarer than prophecy: he is staging a moral scandal in plain sight and daring his audience to admit they already live inside it. The line’s charge comes from its theatrical inversion of Macbeth - “fair is foul” - a choice that frames modern capitalism not as a neutral system of exchange but as an enchantment, a spell we keep reciting because it gets results. He isn’t celebrating greed; he’s coldly acknowledging the bargain industrial society has been making with itself: tolerate the ugly motives because they finance the infrastructure of a better life.

The intent is double-edged. On one level, it’s a brutal utilitarian argument: accumulation, interest, and “precaution” (the anxious hoarding of security) are historically useful because they mobilize investment and growth. On another, it’s an accusation aimed at polite society, which likes to enjoy the fruits of expansion while maintaining the fiction that it arrived through virtue. Keynes refuses that comfort. If we are going to worship avarice, he implies, at least admit it’s worship.

Context matters: Keynes wrote in the shadow of world war and economic upheaval, when the promise of material abundance felt both urgent and fragile. His “another hundred years” isn’t a timeline so much as a warning about moral drift: if you treat selfishness as a necessary engine long enough, it stops being a means and becomes the culture. The subtext is anxious hope - that prosperity could eventually buy us out of this ethical compromise - paired with fear that the compromise will buy us instead.