The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Keynes argues that population growth and economic pressure often drive social change more than ideas or political tyranny.
- In plain terms
- Demographic and economic forces can break social rules more than ideas or bad leaders.
- What can you take from it?
- Population pressure often drives change more than ideology or politics.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- What forces truly drive societal transformation?
- How do demographics compare to ideology in shaping history?
Another view
Population growth is not always the primary driver of social change.
More from John Maynard Keynes
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, government…
Permalink to quote #34 Leninism is a combination of two things which Europeans have kept for some centuries in different compartments of the soul - religion and business. We are shoc…
Permalink to quote #36 Watching the company, with six or seven senses not available to ordinary men, judging character, motive, and subconscious impulse, perceiving what each was thi…
Permalink to quote #33
Related quotes
In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.
John Maynard KeynesJohn Maynard Keynes quote #4 Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeosis ep…
Karl MarxKarl Marx quote #32 The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the…
John Maynard KeynesJohn Maynard Keynes quote #51