FRDE:The guy who owns this site is a stickler for precision.
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http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/quotings.htm#JMKeynes
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) :
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
(The Economist, 1999-12-18, p.47; reply to accusation of inconsistency)
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FRDE:Personally I don't consider The Economist that reliable
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http://www.economist.com/research/Economics/alphabetic.cfm?LETTER=K
As for the frequency with which his opinions would evolve: ?When the
facts change, I change my mind ? what do you do, sir??
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http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=87992
John Maynard Keynes, upon being questioned by a reporter about
changing his mind on an issue responded by saying,
When the facts change, I change my mind -- what do you do, sir?
The reporter promptly shut up.
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http://www.fransgroenendijk.nl/reactieding.php?id=252_0_1_0_C
According to Samuel Brittan, Keynes said something else:
Lord Keynes is popularly supposed to have said "When the facts change,
I change my mind." This banal misattribution drives me up the wall.
What he probably said was "When I change my mind I say so, what do you
do?"
FRDE: This sounds interesting
- Brittan is a very long term writer on the Financial Times
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FRDE:Hmm you're not the first to ask the question
- This is a mail archive
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pkt/2001m10/msg00087.htm
Michael: I used the quote for an epigraph, and lifted it from M. Blaug's
"John Maynard Keynes"...which I don't have around anymore. Chris
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http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/interwar/keynes.htm
John Maynard Keynes, "National Self-Sufficiency," The Yale Review,
Vol. 22, no. 4 (June 1933), pp. 755-769.
|Looking again to-day at the statements of these fundarmental truths
which I then gave, I do not find myself disputing them. Yet the
orientation of my mind is changed; and I share this change of mind
with many others.|
FRDE: well that /is/ from the horse's mouth
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FRDE: Here is Samual Brittan FT 9/6/2003
http://www.nejtillemu.com/samuelbrittan.htm
J. M. Keynes is often reported to have said, "When the facts change I
change my mind". It is unlikely that he said anything so banal. He is
more likely to have said, "When I change my mind I say so, what do you
do?"
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www.spokesmanbooks.com/Spokesman/PDF/mbb71.pdf
- Interesting, a review on a book on Keynes, it refers to Roy Harrod
(Keynes biographer)
|As a tail-piece I should record the fact that Roy Harrod, Keynes’s
devotedfollower and biographer, was active during the 1960s in the
promotion of aBritain-Commonwealth-European Free Trade Association
having some links ofplanned trade with the Soviet Union as an
alternative to the European CommonMarket. As I sat on a committee with
Harrod in this promotion, I asked him oneday whether Keynes would have
supported us. He said that he believed that hewould and reminded me of
one of Keynes’s favourite put-downs: ‘Whencircumstances change I
change my mind. What do you do?’|
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It's curious that the quote should be so widely used, yet I can see no
firm attribution for it.
I must have first heard it around 1976, almost definitely from one
specific economics tutor, but I had got it slightly garbled (well
blunter, which may have been the version I was told) and recently
misattributed it to Churchill
- dying grey cells.
It is quite possible that it was carved out of his writing.
The best bet is probably the Roy Harrod biography.
I certainly don't consider The Economist of 1999 to be a remotely reliable source.
An interesting question. |
