Finishing a thought

Brad DeLong, in a 2013 post, quoted Keynes from the online Gutenberg version of The Economic Consequences of the Peace:

After 1870 there was developed on a large scale an unprecedented situation.... In this economic Eldorado, in this economic Utopia, as the earlier economists would have deemed it, most of us were brought up.

Keynes was born in 1883, making him one of those brought up in the "economic Utopia" that developed after 1870. Moreover, he was all of 36 years old when he wrote Consequences. For what it's worth I began studying the economy in 1977, so I have studied it now for ten years more than Keynes had been alive when he wrote that book. And yet, the best advice I could offer you is just read Keynes. The quote continues:

That happy age lost sight of a view of the world which filled with deep-seated melancholy the founders of our Political Economy.

The founders of Political Economy were filled with melancholy because the economy as they knew it was not capable of being Utopia. But the post-1870 economists, growing up in an apparent Utopia, were full pleased with the success of their science and their efforts. (To my knowledge Keynes doesn't say they took credit for that success, but that *is* the way of human nature, don't you think?)

Sixteen years after publishing Consequences, Keynes published another book: The General Theory. In this latter book the same thought returns, the thought that giddiness replaces melancholy among those who lose sight of reality. But this time, Keynes brings the thought to a clear conclusion:

... nothing short of the exuberance of the greatest age of the inducement to investment could have made it possible to lose sight of the theoretical possibility of its insufficiency.

(From Chapter 23.)

The earlier economists might have considered it an economic Utopia, Keynes suggests, but saw Utopia as unreachable. The thinking of the post-1870 economists was that Utopia had been achieved. It would have been no great leap to reach that conclusion. But it took an outside-the-box thinker even to notice that this Utopia was, as Keynes described it, "unstable and peculiar."

The General Theory came out 16 years after Consequences. It took Keynes 16 years to finish his thought.

That's okay. It took me until now -- thirteen years at least -- just to notice the connection between the two books.