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From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-12-27:
Keynes's prescriptions were guided by his conception of money, which plays a disturbing role in his economics. Most economists have seen money simply as a means of payment, an improvement on barter. Keynes emphasized its role as a "store of value." Why, he asked, should anyone outside a lunatic asylum wish to "hold" money? The answer he gave was that "holding" money was a way of postponing transactions. The "desire to hold money as a store of wealth is a barometer of the degree of our distrust of our own calculations and conventions concerning the future. . . . The possession of actual money lulls our disquietude; and the premium we require to make us part with money is a measure of the degree of our disquietude." -- Robert Skidelsky, quoting John Maynard Keynes in "The Remedist", New York Times, Dec 12, 2008.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/magazine/14wwln-lede-t.html]
(submitted to the mailing list by Chris Doherty)
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Hmmm. It sounds to me like it would be more accurate to say that instead of distrust of ourselves it is anxiety about the unknowability of the future. We all differ and fluctuate in our senses of how predictable the future is, and obviously that is contingent on the level of chaos of our environments, our self-evaluated skill at predicting, and our comfort level with ambiguity. Thus we can say more fairly that the desire to hold money as a store of wealth is a barometer of the degree of anxiety about the predictability of the future we experience.