CONCEPT
Short-Run Moral Priority
The Keynesian commitment — embedded in in the long run we are all dead — that economic policy must serve the generation living through a transition, not the generation that will benefit from its completion.
Short-run moral priority is the ethical commitment embedded in Keynes's most misread sentence. It holds that economic analysis addressing only long-run outcomes performs a specific act of moral evasion — treating the people living through a transition as data points in a historical trend rather than as human beings with finite time and pressing needs. The long run will arrive; the expansion will probably come; the grandchildren will probably benefit. But the generation living through the transition cannot eat probably. They need institutions, support, and the deliberate, sustained institutional action that converts long-run possibility into short-run reality.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The principle is Keynesian in origin but reaches back through utilitarian ethics and forward to contemporary policy debates. It rejects the view — common in classical economics and in some strands of libertarian thought — that present suffering is justified by future gains, so long as the future gains are sufficiently large.
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