An OP-Ed in today’s Sunday Review section of the NY Times, by Sylvia Nasar, Keynes: The Sunny Economist missed the real source of Keynes ability to see silver linings where most others saw failure. Keynes faced economic failures having studied how nature uses the end of one thing to begin another.
He saw sunshine by seeing through the darkness,
not by denying it.
Sylvia,
It’s fun to play up myths, but yours would be spoiled by the reality of a strange intellect like J M Keynes. In order to see the “sunny side” of things Keynes unabashedly faced the deepest darkness behind what ailed the economy. He smashed or poked holes in the darkness he saw, as a way to find the light, rather than by clinging blindly to some faith in optimism, as you suggest, a kind of sunny silliness.
![Starry Night](https://synapse9.com/issues/images/van-gogh-starry-night-c-1889a.jpg)
You have not read Chapter 16 of The General Theory. It’s quite obvious. You’re in good company, of course, as virtually no one has. In Chapter 16 Keynes steps right into and through the deepest darkness, the end of the road for his own growth theory. Of course, there is also an extremely sunny side too, but if you don’t face the “darkness” of the natural facts at hand, you won’t see it. Continue reading Keynes saw through his fears… by facing them.