the.com/long run

means The eventual stretch of time in which outcomes reflect the true underlying pattern, once short-term flukes, excuses, and noise have worn off.

from A phrase built from plain English, not borrowed from elsewhere — 'run' in the sense of a continuous stretch or course (as in 'a run of luck' or 'the run of a play'), paired with 'long' to mark duration. It entered common economic use through writers discussing cause and effect over time, most famously echoed in the economist John Maynard Keynes's wry line that 'in the long run we are all dead' — a jab at the habit of deferring hard truths to some comfortably distant future.