Wit & Attitude Quote by John Maynard Keynes

Keynes slips a quiet bomb under the table here: the most radical thing he can imagine is that improvement might not be finished. The line is deliberately over-cautious - "would not be foolish", "contemplate", "possibility" - the verbal equivalent of an economist clearing his throat before saying something politically explosive. He isn’t promising utopia; he’s licensing hope as a rational position.

The intent is persuasion through restraint. Keynes knew that talk of "progress" can sound like sermonizing, or like a salesman’s pitch. So he wraps the idea in hedges that flatter the reader’s self-image: you’re not gullible, you’re just being intellectually responsible by leaving room for upside. That’s a rhetorical move aimed at an audience trained to distrust grand narratives, especially after war, depression, and the daily evidence of human folly.

Subtext: economic life is not a fixed tragedy. Institutions can be redesigned; scarcity can be managed; human choices, not iron laws, determine outcomes. That’s classic Keynes: markets are powerful but not sacred, and the future is a policy decision as much as a forecast. The phrase "far greater" hints at compounding effects - productivity, public investment, social insurance - the idea that small shifts in governance and confidence can unlock outsized gains.

Context matters. Keynes wrote in an era when "progress" had been both vindicated (industrial capacity) and mocked (industrial slaughter). He’s threading the needle between post-Victorian faith and 20th-century disillusionment, arguing that optimism can be disciplined rather than naive. It works because it sounds like a concession, but functions like a door left open on purpose.