"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones"
About this Quote
Progress rarely fails for lack of invention; it fails because yesterday's framework still feels like common sense. Keynes aims his line like a scalpel at the complacency of established thinking, especially in economics, where elegant models can harden into moral intuitions: thrift is virtue, markets self-correct, hardship is cleansing. The sentence is engineered to demote "new ideas" from heroic breakthrough to easy part, and to recast the real battle as psychological and institutional: prying loose the assumptions that silently govern what counts as reasonable.
The subtext is quietly accusatory. If you're stuck, it's not because reality is inscrutable; it's because you're loyal to an old map. Keynes understood that policy debates are often proxy wars over metaphors. When the Great Depression exposed the limits of classical economics, the obstacle wasn't missing data or imagination. It was the prestige of orthodoxy and the social comfort it provided to elites and officials who had built careers on it. "Escaping" is the key verb: it frames inherited ideas as a kind of confinement, even a captor, not a tradition you politely revise.
Context matters. Writing in an era when mass unemployment made economic theory brutally consequential, Keynes is not offering a self-help bromide. He's issuing a warning about governance: bad ideas don't die because they're disproven; they die when institutions, incentives, and identities stop needing them. The line still lands because it explains why smart people can watch evidence pile up and remain unmoved. The hardest revolution is cognitive, not technical.
The subtext is quietly accusatory. If you're stuck, it's not because reality is inscrutable; it's because you're loyal to an old map. Keynes understood that policy debates are often proxy wars over metaphors. When the Great Depression exposed the limits of classical economics, the obstacle wasn't missing data or imagination. It was the prestige of orthodoxy and the social comfort it provided to elites and officials who had built careers on it. "Escaping" is the key verb: it frames inherited ideas as a kind of confinement, even a captor, not a tradition you politely revise.
Context matters. Writing in an era when mass unemployment made economic theory brutally consequential, Keynes is not offering a self-help bromide. He's issuing a warning about governance: bad ideas don't die because they're disproven; they die when institutions, incentives, and identities stop needing them. The line still lands because it explains why smart people can watch evidence pile up and remain unmoved. The hardest revolution is cognitive, not technical.
Quote Details
| Topic | Change |
|---|
More Quotes by John
Add to List
