"wasting our time"

This is one of those times I have to put something on the blog to improve my chances of being able to find it again later.

Here it is: In Finding equilibrium, Lars P. Syll quotes Franklin M. Fisher:

An extremely prominent economist [Milton Friedman – LPS] long ago remarked to me in passing that the study of stability is unimportant because it is obvious that the economy is stable and, if it isn’t, we are all wasting our time.

Come to think of it, Friedman was dissing Maynard Keynes. For in Chapter 2 of his General Theory Keynes wrote:

Most treatises on the theory of value and production are primarily concerned with the distribution of a given volume of employed resources between different uses...

... But the pure theory of what determines the actual employment of the available resources has seldom been examined in great detail... I mean, not that the topic has been overlooked, but that the fundamental theory underlying it has been deemed so simple and obvious that it has received, at the most, a bare mention.

"This book," Keynes says in his preface, "has evolved into what is primarily a study of the forces which determine changes in the scale of output and employment as a whole..."

Keynes, then, described his book as an attempt to understand the forces determining growth and the lack of growth -- to understand, in a word, instability.

Milton Friedman then described the work of Keynes as a waste of time.