Amid all the excuses you hear for not taking action to end this depression, one refrain is repeated constantly by apologists for inaction: we need, they say, to focus on the long run, not the short run.

This is wrong on multiple levels, as we’ll see later in this book. Among other things, it involves an intellectual abdication, a refusal to accept responsibility for understating the current depression; it’s tempting and easy to wave all this unpleasantness away and talk airily about the long run, but that’s taking the lazy, cowardly way out. John Maynard Keynes was making exactly this point when he wrote one of his most famous passages: “This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run, we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the sea is flat again.”

Focusing only on the long run means ignoring the vast suffering the current depression is inflicting, the lives it is ruining irreparably as you read this. But that’s not all. Our short-run problems–if you can call a slump now in its fifth year “short-run”–are hurting our long-run prospects too, through multiple channels.